I found my experience trying to work with a large OCaml base a nightmare — when signatures changed in an unstable dependency (e.g. function argument removed and nested inside another), the errors spat out by the typechecker were utterly incomphrehensible.
This was largely due to automatic currying in OCaml — if I have a function call "some_function arg1 arg2" and "some_function" adds a third argument, that call becomes a function that requires a single argument, arg3, but the typechecker message that tells you all of this is well-nigh unintelligible.
Switching to Rust was a blessed relief, not least because Rust has much better developer tooling and documentation (but also no automatic currying).
It made me think that OCaml is efficient and beautiful if you're the only person touching your specific codebase (which I think is true in the vast majority of cases) or if many of your colleagues are deep OCaml officionados with PhDs, but it's not a good collaborative language for the rest of us.
This was largely due to automatic currying in OCaml — if I have a function call "some_function arg1 arg2" and "some_function" adds a third argument, that call becomes a function that requires a single argument, arg3, but the typechecker message that tells you all of this is well-nigh unintelligible.
Switching to Rust was a blessed relief, not least because Rust has much better developer tooling and documentation (but also no automatic currying).
It made me think that OCaml is efficient and beautiful if you're the only person touching your specific codebase (which I think is true in the vast majority of cases) or if many of your colleagues are deep OCaml officionados with PhDs, but it's not a good collaborative language for the rest of us.