I used to scoff to the language impurity and no operator overloading. Ocaml always felt like a beaten ML, always second in class compared to haskell.
As usual, superficial views completely change when you actually start using the language. I never did anything mayor (1yr+dev) on it. I only contributed to existing projects and some small personal ones. I found it more pleasant to use compared to haskell (ghc effectively), less surprising, and and a lot more practical.
Combined with a live repl, it feels very close to how I normally work with lisp. In fact, I actually find it ambivalent compared to julia for explorative work and there's a lot of interesting and recent work being pushed to opam regarding this (dataframe/sci/numerical plotting libraries).
I have my vim open and a split below where i run utop. Then i can evaluate any expression with <C-c C-c> and see the result instantly in utop. I usually also run a smaller split where i run dune runtest -w, so all tests are run on each save.
For a compiled language OCaml is incredibly dynamic when developing. Just like a lisp.
Ocaml is a nice language to work with. I briefly worked on Frama-C as a student and have only fond memories of it. I think it's the same for most people who had to use it in the past which is why it get upvotes.
It has always seemed both very modern in the semantic tools it gave (inference, pattern matching, variant types, the module system) but not too in your face. You could very much code in Ocaml as you would in any imperative language and it would be fine and you would still benefit from the nice type system. Generally you don't want to because the other tools the language gives you feel nicer but sometimes it's simpler and that's fine. Plus, the community tends to be very pragramatic and non judgemental about how you achieve things.
In the strictly browser realm, there's also Brr: https://erratique.ch/software/brr/doc/Brr_canvas/index.html which is a recent reimagining of the traditional interface to browser APIs (provided by js_of_ocaml) in a much more idiomatic OCaml style.
This looks to be a much improved version of what used to be provided by the now defunct `Graphics` module. Definitely have to try it out. `Graphics` was X11-only, but it was the only way to produce on-screen graphics directly in OCaml (i.e. without using a web browser or other image display app). Very nice to have something like that again.
The graphics library still exists, it is only distributed as a separate library rather than bundled with the compiler distribution, which seems like a better fit for a pedagogical library like `graphics`. Also `graphics` works fine on Windows. In fact, nowadays the edge-case for `graphics` support is MacOs with its dwindling support for X11.
Not trying to be annoying, but it's sometimes fun/interesting[*] to see that C (which gets a lot of critique here) is still important in order to enable higher-level languages like here.
It could also be indicative how verbose C is. Given it is used in the C stubs, it does a lot of data conversion from/to OCaml values which increases the line count fast.
