OCaml — first impressions

I’m doing research to try to find my “next language” after Python. I’ll publish an article on that eventually, but for now here are some of my reactions to OCaml:

• Calling their REPL “toplevel” is a bit confusing
• The REPL needs some serious work: no multiline editing, I can’t move the cursor with arrow keys, no history
• The talk of “two standard libraries” (Core vs Batteries) makes me uneasy
• It seems the community hasn’t settled on a standard build system
• Books and documentation gives examples of misleading code (due to inconsistent indent) because the compiler doesn’t give you warnings or errors. It seems to me like an unnecessary usability flaw.
• No iPhone app. This would be nice to play around on the train to/from work. I am a big fan of Pythonista so I miss this.
• Having to run “opam init” is weird. No other package manager I know of requires something like that. It tried to ask me to update my fish config but for some reason it seemed to have answered “no” by default and continued.
• opam output while running is quite pretty
• When reading examples it looks a little bit like OCaml has significant whitespace but only in a few very rare cases. Reading more it looks like not. I think it would be better if the language was consistent and easy to understand. I prefer significant white space, coming from Python, but the automatic insertion of “;;” in some seemingly (to newbies) random places in the grammar looks quite icky to me. It’s especially icky because it doesn’t even require newlines, so “let foo = 1 let bar = 2;;” is valid even though there’s no newline before the second let.
• The manual is super ugly :P
• The manual has weird choices like starting a section with the full BNF grammar. If the manual is for compiler writers, then it shouldn’t be called “the manual”! If it’s not for compiler writers, the BNF grammar should be in a reference section, not the first thing you have to scroll past.
• Feedback in the REPL needs work (notice that it says “the highlighted” but nothing is in fact highlighted):

# let foo = (1;;
Syntax error: ')' expected, the highlighted '(' might be unmatched

• In general a lot of syntactical errors just ends up with the error “Syntax error” without any more information, at least in the REPL.
• Copy pasting the first example on the “learn” section on the homepage to a file and running it produces the error reproduced below. The problem is that while it’s formatted as one piece of code, it’s actually a bunch of snippets that have to be separated by “;;”, and even then it’s not runnable because it requires the definition of the variable “l”. Even worse, these examples are pretty terrible in trying to show the feel of a language to a beginner. Compare with the homepages of Python or Ruby.

➜ ~ ocaml foo.ml
File "./foo.ml", line 3, characters 15-21:
Error: This expression has type float -> float -> float
       but an expression was expected of type
         ('a ->
          'b ->
          'c -> 'd -> 'e -> 'f -> 'g -> 'h -> 'i -> 'j -> 'k -> 'l -  > 'm) ->
         'n ->
         'a ->
         'b -> 'c -> 'd -> 'e -> 'f -> 'g -> 'h -> 'i -> 'j -> 'k -> 'l -> 'm
        Type float is not compatible with type
          'a ->
          'b -> 'c -> 'd -> 'e -> 'f -> 'g -> 'h -> 'i -> 'j -> 'k -> 'l -> 'm

• Strings are 8-bit only. No Unicode in the standard library. This is really quite unforgivable in 2017