Ocaml has 100% less bikeshedding and no propensity for unending puritanical holy wars. It's a language for getting things done, as opposed to thinking about finding a way to do something that satisfies an obsessive compulsive desire to eliminate 100% of sides effects for no practical reason.
Except we've been waiting how many years for actual multicore support and ad-hoc polymorphism (or anything approaching it)...?
No, OCaml really isn't a language where things move forward; quite the opposite.
Also, if you had actually written any Haskell code you'd know it's not about eliminating any side effects, it's about denoting them in the type system. Your comment reeks of someone who hasn't actually used either of these languages.
