As usual, superficial views completely change when you actually start using the language. I never did anything mayor (1yr+dev) on it. I only contributed to existing projects and some small personal ones. I found it more pleasant to use compared to haskell (ghc effectively), less surprising, and and a lot more practical.
Combined with a live repl, it feels very close to how I normally work with lisp. In fact, I actually find it ambivalent compared to julia for explorative work and there's a lot of interesting and recent work being pushed to opam regarding this (dataframe/sci/numerical plotting libraries).
It's old, and thus less sexy/marketable.
I have my vim open and a split below where i run utop. Then i can evaluate any expression with <C-c C-c> and see the result instantly in utop. I usually also run a smaller split where i run dune runtest -w, so all tests are run on each save.
For a compiled language OCaml is incredibly dynamic when developing. Just like a lisp.
It's been gaining traction in the past few years. I've never dealt with it professionally, but just from my hobby stuff I've had recruiters reach out.
What libraries do you recommend for these? I would love a statically typed alternative to R.
It has always seemed both very modern in the semantic tools it gave (inference, pattern matching, variant types, the module system) but not too in your face. You could very much code in Ocaml as you would in any imperative language and it would be fine and you would still benefit from the nice type system. Generally you don't want to because the other tools the language gives you feel nicer but sometimes it's simpler and that's fine. Plus, the community tends to be very pragramatic and non judgemental about how you achieve things.