"Never have I took so long, to write so little code, that does so much"
OCaml can be a big learning curve, but I urge you to push through. The syntax might not be everyone's cup of team, but you get used to it quickly.
There's too little of it! OCaml seems to take a "you don't need syntax except when you need syntax" approach, which I found very destabilizing. One of the major online OCaml tutorials said something like "If it doesn't work the way you expect, try adding parentheses", and I thought "Oh hell no. In a Lisp I know exactly how many parentheses I need: all of them". I prefer not having to think about it, and letting the parentheses become invisible to me.
But otherwise I have a deep and irrational fondness for the language, and still wish I'd been able to make it stick.
That sounds like what I did with C++ with * and & when I didn't understood them. Do you think it's a lack of exprience/comprehension on your part, or that some parts of the syntax are fundamentally flawed?
But so much of the syntax, particularly around function calls, is simply a long row of whitespace-separated tokens, and I feel like my brain has to do extra work to parse what's what, and figure out associativity, and constantly remember what the ~ and the ? are doing. This[1] section of the tutorial makes perfect sense when you read it, but that doesn't mean you can easily scan a long function call with a lot of arguments, and instantly see what's happening.
The block-level syntax is great. But it got to the point where if I didn't write/read OCaml for a few days in a row, I forgot how it worked. And that's simply calling a function, nothing esoteric.
[1]: https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/labels.html#When-and-when-...
> The syntax for labels and optional arguments is confusing, and you may often wonder when to use ~foo, when to use ?foo and when to use plain foo. It's something of a black art which takes practice to get right.
So I don't think it's just you.