After a while with #OCaml my conclusion there is that:
OCaml really is a language for people who are fairly mathy and academic but who still want to get stuff done. The culture felt entirely focused around this question. So you get the dense academic paper not to scare you, but because they think you will be legitimately interested in it (albeit probably not right after hello world, but fairly soon).
OTOH there's a kind of ruthless efficiency: if you need to compromise you compromise.
vascorsd