[jahewson]

F# is a superset of OCaml and both are descendants of ML (ML was created here in Edinburgh). Having worked with Ocaml extensively I would say that the ecosystem around the language is pretty stale: the standard library sucks, as does the documentation for it and important libraries such as "batteries included" are under the GPL, which rules out many uses. Usability is poor: stack traces can be a nightmare to get working properly, the compiler errors are the worst I have ever encountered anywhere (including C++ templates!), there's no standard build chain, the list goes on...

I switched to Scala and haven't looked back. Haskell is very popular here in Edinburgh also.

[jon_smark]

You should take a new/better look at OCaml, as most of the information you mentioned is wrong and/or out-of-date. For instance:

* F# is not a superset of OCaml. OCaml has a number of powerful features missing from F#, like functors, polymorphic variants, and first-class modules.

* I disagree that the ecosystem is "stale". There's lots of recent activity around the language, and you can find libraries for almost everything.

[gtani]

also, there's Real World Ocaml beta, publically available. In this case, beta means manuscript has been commented on by many qualified reviewers already,

http://anil.recoil.org/2013/06/17/real-world-ocaml-beta-avai...