I'm an OCaml fan as well and having written in a number of languages I can say that complexity in and of itself is probably not the enemy. I think the problem i

I'm an OCaml fan as well and having written in a number of languages I can say that complexity in and of itself is probably not the enemy. I think the problem is more related to modularity. For instance I don't think it is the best policy to make a skip list implementation as simple as possible because it is self contained and will likely be used by many of my programs in the future. Complexity only becomes a problem when it is no longer possible for a developer to fit all the pieces of the program in her mind at once. Abstraction and modularity can generally help with this.