[rbehrends]

> This is very consistently my biggest problem with OCaml: it just doesn't follow conventions set in other ecosystems.

Well, the reason is that Caml predates those ecosystems; the original Caml was released nearly a decade before Java [1], and ML itself dates back to the 1970s.

[1] http://caml.inria.fr/about/history.en.html

[implicit]

Right. I mean only to say that OCaml's superficial strangeness is regrettably offputting.

Talk of syntax is almost always history and religion, not science.