My thoughts on OCaml

It does sound to me like you stopped reading after the first point. Maybe you didn't give the post a chance?

> No standard and easy way of implementing interfaces

Firstly another commenter has mentioned [1] modules as interfaces. There is also the object system [2] which I've seen used to great effect in similar scenarios.

Typeclasses and modular implicits are fantastic - being a heavy user of Scala and Rust; but I've always found that they tend to be best when used as an alternative to macros, for derivation purposes.

The interface and code split in OCaml is also really nice for value types and comes with no limitations; for years, we had issues in Scala because of the host platform, and in Rust exposing functions for your newtype can be oddly boilerplate heavy.

> Bad standard library

The OCaml standard library is (infamously) anemic and obviously is not as fully-featured as something like Java or Python, but since alternative libraries tend to be compatible with the bundled StdLib (both use the same `option` and `list` type), it means that having libraries dependent on different ones is not a huge issue. Learning resources, can be confusing though.

I'm not sure why it's a problem certain data structures are mutable and some are persistent; the documentation is usually fairly clear and you usually have a performance characteristic in mind when selecting your data structure.

Universal equality and hashes are indeed a little annoying (here an `Eq` typeclass would be great!) but I do understand the original decision to have them inside. At the very least, it's not pointer based equality and since records and most types don't have subtypes, you don't run into as many issues. You can of course use the equality methods on the modules themselves and since `Hashtbl` and co have functors, you aren't penalized for it.

Strings are a problem-ish (what older language doesn't have string issues ha!), but there is utf-8 support now with [3].

> but just two years ago it was common to use Makefiles to build OCaml projects

It is true that OCaml has a unix-y flavour, but honestly I don't really understand the snipe at make. Sure there are alternatives, but make is bundled on most distros, has a quick startup time and a lot of people are familiar with it.

More of the community is moving towards dune as well, which is pretty good; the docs could do with better indexing but there are some features such as promotion which are really nice.

> was no standard way of doing compile-time metaprogramming

I haven't used ppx much so I can't really comment here.

Finally they've missed the biggest reasons to /use/ OCaml.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=4ad [2] https://ocaml.org/docs/objects [3] https://v2.ocaml.org/api/Stdlib.String.html#utf_8

You missed writing what they are :P

God I hate this term because it's not even a problem. For a human reader, it's pretty obvious that an "else" should belong to the closest "if"; and it's quite difficult to write a mechanical parser that would match "else" with the furthest "if" instead. So what is, exactly, the problem? That the grammar is technically ambiguous? Who cares? The authors of LR-generators? They don't, they have been resolving shift-reduce conflicts by default in favour of shifting for half a century already.