The overall structure stays the same, but we have made some changes: notably, we reduced the workload by suppressing some exercises which turned out to be too difficult, and quite a few glitches have been fixed.

If you have precise suggestions for improvement, please do not hesitate to send them to the course authors, there maight still be time to take them into account.

Why OCaml instead of other functional languages such as Scala, Haskell, Erlang, etc...? Is there anything unique about OCaml.

A mother offered his son, on his birthday, two nice designer ties. Naturally, the son quickly took one of the two ties, put it on, and showed it smiling to his mother.

The mother, almost crying, asked "You dont like the other tie?"

Because they are French ;) and Ocaml is as good as those you mentioned for teaching FP.

It is purer than Erlang, has less cruft than Scala, is more practical than Haskell, and in my opinion has a very nice syntax. It is also very fast.

>It is purer than Erlang

Not sure what value of 'pure' you are using here. Erlang has (practically) no mutation to speak of. Thus I would consider that purer.

Ocaml on the other hand is as mutating as you want it to be.

Yes I guess I was throwing static typing, somewhat incorrectly, into the "pure" catch-all.

I did this last year and don't remember much. What were the sizable discreet jumps?

I think some of the "question 3s" in the exercises were quite a challenge about 3 weeks into the course, and for people like me who insist on getting 100%, I remember spending 4-5x the allotted time on them (or maybe I'm just slow). But as per @ocamlmoocs comment here it looks like some of this has been looked at.