Speaking as someone who really likes OCaml, I think the best parts about are the type system (very similar to Haskell's), the module system, and its explicit fo

Speaking as someone who really likes OCaml, I think the best parts about are the type system (very similar to Haskell's), the module system, and its explicit focus on being a pragmatic multiparadigm language. It has some gotchas* and tradeoffs, like every real language, but it's quite worth learning. It's particularly well-suited for projects that involve complex data structures (e.g. compilers, see: http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html) or heavy high-level numeric computation. It would probably be quite good for game programming. Also, it does both bytecode and (Fast!) native compilation, so it's pretty portable. * Many of which are due to the small community, e.g. somewhat poor documentation in many third-party libraries, few books in English (though the English translation of the French O'Reilly book is online as a free PDF, and quite good IMHO: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/ http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/). Also, it doesn't have operator/function overloading (outside of its OO framework), which can be annoying, though this seems to gain it near-instantaneous compilation, even with its remarkably thorough compile-time error checking.