What's wrong with the OCaml syntax? It's much more clean than say scala's one, it's indentation insensitive, and a' list feels more relevant than the list<'T>
Overall, it's not a terrible syntax, but it feels a lot like someone just invented things along the way as they needed them, without a cohesive plan. Lots of pragmatic but visually ugly choices.
I also take issue with the tooling; things like error messages, or just the antiquated feel of the CLI tools. For example, having a REPL without built-in readline support (rlwrap to the rescue) in this day and age is not acceptable.
Could you show an example, I don't get it?
>The expression termination issue (";;")
Strange, I've never used ";;" in my code, only in repl.
>Operators not being overloaded is annoying, although there's a valid argument for explicitness.
Overloading is harmful. It's definitely the wrong way to do ad-hoc polymorphism, and OCaml have a polymorphic comparison operators, which brought so much headache. Type classes or modular implicits are the right way to do ad-hoc. Looking forward to see modular implicits in OCaml [1].
>For example, having a REPL without built-in readline support (rlwrap to the rescue)
What do you mean by "readline" support?
let foo : unit -> unit = <code>
let foo = function
| <pattern match stuff>
let foo = (function () -> <code>)
let foo = (fun () -> <code>)
let foo = do_stuff + 42;
> What do you mean by "readline" support?
Readline is a library that adds a line editor to a REPL. It adds keyboard shortcuts (arrow keys etc.), history, autocompletion, and so on. Unlike almost every single REPL out there (Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc.), OCaml doesn't come with built-in support, as far as I've been able to determine. You have to run "rlwrap ocaml" to get Readline into your REPL.
The one that bugs me the most is nested match expressions, which often need to be wrapped in parenthesis.