Indeed. Shared state is absolutely necessary sometimes, it's just not a good default. Exactly what you said about Clojure applies to OCaml as well, except the

Indeed. Shared state is absolutely necessary sometimes, it's just not a good default. Exactly what you said about Clojure applies to OCaml as well, except the syntax in that case is let x = 42 in ... and let x = ref 42 in ...