Having used CMUCL/SBCL for a while, I always found ocaml's "well, you can compile your code, but then you can't run it in the REPL" to be off-putting. (For my purposes the CLR JIT compiler for F# is good enough.)
Is it "not quite as good as Haskell but maybe it's alright language"?
- both Kotlin and ClojureScript don't compile code written in their "native" language (java) to JavaScript, limiting the ability to leverage existing libraries. - ScalaJS is still experimental. - Haskell looked promising, I asked a haskell programmer to run that evaluation for me, but fay/haste aren't complete enough for serious (non-ui) JavaScript work and GHCJS generates 5mb JS files. - OCaml had a viable project in about half the time I estimated it would take.
And on a personal note, Scala seemed great at first but after SML/OCaml I find the number of times that I have to tell the type checker what I'm doing immensely frustrating :)
I have three issues with Scala:
- Having to wrap free functions in objects
- I feel Haskell type system is easier to understand than Scala's
- The concept of open and closed case classes for sum types feel wrong
So in the end I actually enjoy more using F# in general, and Clojure when targeting the JVM.
Now back to reading "Real World OCaml". :)
The java collections & libraries don't help me when I need to manage my own memory. I've spent entirely too much time in the unsafe package because the JVM doesn't allow me to do cheap ffi unlike Haskell or even Microsoft's CLI.