I used to scoff to the language impurity and no operator overloading. Ocaml always felt like a beaten ML, always second in class compared to haskell.

As usual, superficial views completely change when you actually start using the language. I never did anything mayor (1yr+dev) on it. I only contributed to existing projects and some small personal ones. I found it more pleasant to use compared to haskell (ghc effectively), less surprising, and and a lot more practical.

Combined with a live repl, it feels very close to how I normally work with lisp. In fact, I actually find it ambivalent compared to julia for explorative work and there's a lot of interesting and recent work being pushed to opam regarding this (dataframe/sci/numerical plotting libraries).

It's old, and thus less sexy/marketable.