yminsky

I think Lisp and Scheme have excellent macro systems, which are eminently worth stealing. I don't think OCaml will evolve into them on the type-system level though...

Haskell is nice and all, but it's hardly better in every respect. To name a few problems with Haskell relative to OCaml:

- pervasive use of laziness makes space utilization hard to reason about

- Highly complex runtime (mostly due to the need to work around laziness), which makes it harder to trust the correctness of the overall system and to and understand performance

- Significantly more complicated type system, which has its ups and downs. It surely makes the language more complicated to learn in and use in many cases. Benjamin Pierce, no slouch himself, has pointed out that he sometimes has to go read a research paper or two to understand some new library.

- Enforced type-level separation between pure and unpure code, which again, has its ups and downs.

Haskell is a great language. But it surely doesn't dominate OCaml.

And the OCaml community is doing quite well of late, as far as I can tell. There's a lot of new energy in the last few years, with great progress in both the core language and in the surrounding infrastructure.

The documentation generation tools are a bit of a mess at the moment. We're working actively with OCaml Labs to improve the tools here, and we expect to have the documentation in a much cleaner and easier to use state (and prettier) by publication time.

When we're out of beta, we'll open the book up for people to read without any kind of login. For now, though, we're putting this out there largely to get feedback before publication. Unfortunately, github has fairly coarse-grained permissions, so we need to ask for rather a lot.