It's not as one sided as you make out. OCaml definitely has some advantages (such as native code compilation and support for some extra language features such a

It's not as one sided as you make out. OCaml definitely has some advantages (such as native code compilation and support for some extra language features such as functors), but F# has it's own advantages too, such as: * A larger choice of available libraries. * Multicore support (OCaml is getting this soon, but it's currently single core). * A more straightforward standard library (OCaml has three different competing standard libraries (the default one, Batteries, Core), and as far as I can see the F# one is better than all of them in terms of consistency (for example, can expect the same group of Iter, Map, Filter, etc... on all grouped data structures (Arrays, Lists, Sequences, Maps, etc...).). * Visual Studio is a damn good IDE, and makes coding in F# even better. Perhaps something similar exists for OCaml, but I'm not aware of anything of the calibre of VS. Worth noting in both cases you don't need an IDE to be effective. I'm not dismissing OCaml, I'd like to learn it one day too, but I hope I've helped explain why some people would want to learn F# first.