I'd never seen the verbose syntax for f#, I thought you had to write it the whitespace dependent way. Huh.

It's been tried https://people.csail.mit.edu/mikelin/ocaml+twt/

ReasonML or ReScript not your cup of tea? They are different syntactical front-ends for OCaml.

Lightweight syntax is a pain to use for blind people. Glad OCaml hasn't fallen for that fad.

This so-called lightweight syntax gives me anxiety just scrolling through these examples.

OCaml syntax is whitespace-insensitive. You don't need to worry about indentation, copy-pasting code snippets, etc. I think that makes for a better experience especially for beginners when the parser is more forgiving.

F# is .NET, so you can have pretty fine grained control over memory layout, right? Spans, packed structs, 8/16/32/64 bit signed/unsigned ints, etc.

That stuff all gets a bit screwy in Ocaml, an int has 31 bits of information but is 32 bits in size, a record with two int 64s ends up being twice you expect, etc.

> when effects are mature (when lwt and async are snuffed out).

That's actually on the way right now. The main concurrency library which is designed for OCaml 5, eio, internally uses effects but doesn't require its users to be exposed to them. Users write code in direct style and don't need to care about internal implementation with effects.