No, I just think after Objective C it's hard to get into a lot of new concepts simultaneously. So it's better to start with those dirty hybrids where you can start with imperative style to get into idiomatic OCaml/Scala approach then and only after dive into pure lazy functional programming with strict static typing. It would be useful to read "Types and Programming languages"(and maybe some other books) as well on this road.

I would disagree about Scala - I tried to get started with it and often got utterly confused. Haskell was easy by comparison - sure there were lots of concepts to learn but less gotchas and much cleaner syntax made up for it.

The way to write imperative style in OCaml is so painful that I'd expect people to just drop off on the way. I mean, it's nice that it's possible, but I don't think it's a reasonable migration path.

Yeah, don't get confused by the fact that there is an "O" in OCaml. This does not mean that you can write "imperative OCaml" the way you can use Scala as "shorter Java". "Imperative OCaml" is much closer to "imperative Haskell" without the monadic effect system.