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Comment by jon_smark | Hacker News Reader

There are several reasons why one would prefer OCaml over F#:

- OCaml is not tied to .NET. Obviously the converse also applies: if you need .NET integration then F# might be a better choice.

- F# does not support some of the more advanced features of the OCaml type system, like polymorphic variants (open unions) and functors. These are very useful OCaml features, IMHO.

- OCaml has gained some very interesting features since F# branched off, which again are not present in F#: modules as first class values, GADTs, and better control over module signatures.

Overall, my recommendation is that unless you are really tied to .NET ecosystem, then OCaml is a more interesting language to learn.

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A few counterpoints in favor of F#:

- Even if your project doesn't need .NET integration, it's nice to have all of the .NET libraries (built-in or otherwise) at your disposal. OCaml also has some nice libraries, but nowhere near what .NET (or Java, for Scala) has -- so it's likely you'll have to implement your own library for some task if it's outside of the mainstream.

- F# has also gained some interesting features since it's branched away from OCaml -- computation expressions (syntactic sugar for monads) and type providers (automatically-generated, strongly-typed interfaces to databases, JSON APIs, etc.), for example.

- .NET has a mature and very fast garbage collector tuned for real world usage (e.g., people running C#/ASP.NET on large webservers). This hugely benefits F#'s performance.

- You can use Visual Studio or MonoDevelop to write and debug F# apps, which makes it much nicer to use in practice. (Oh, and you can get Visual Studio Express for Web if you want to use VS and F# for free.)

I don't have anything against OCaml, I just wanted to point out that F# certainly deserves consideration if you want to learn a new language (i.e., it's not a knock-off version of OCaml).

On the other hand, if you can use .NET, F# is a more practical language to learn. The F# standard libraries and .NET libraries and IDE are miles ahead of anything OCaml has, which in practice far outweighs anything else. If you're picking a language to learn new language concepts, I'd definitely pick OCaml over F# for its modules alone.

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