Comments by "Vitaly L" (@vitalyl1327) on "Ocaml First Thoughts" video.

Eager vs. lazy, simple and powerful module system (still, I'd prefer SML), portable bytecode implementation and highly efficient native compilers for major platforms, quite a bit faster than GHC.
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And another good reason to get at least some OCaml is Coq. One might point to Haskell + Agda, but for Coq there is CompCert, and it's a pretty good reason on its own.
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They belong to very different flavours of functional programming.
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@OverG88 scala can hardly be called a functional language.
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@OverG88 you cannot call a language functional if you MUST use imperative features to use it. It can be a functional-first language, but not properly functional. The crippled JVM runtime limits the FP capabilities of Scala severely. A simple test for you: translate some arbitrarily complex tail-recursive code into CPS and then into SKI combinators (if you want a Y-combinator, define it via SKI). Execute the combinators with your allegedly functional language. If code still works - your language have a right to be considered probably a functional one. If there's no way an ad hoc translation would work without any funny tricks - then, sorry, it's not a functional language, period.
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@duncanw9901 you can do the same with OCaml, adding passes to compiler is trivial. Plus, there's PPX, which is quite a bit more flexible than TH.
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@OverG88 I'm a long time Chisel user, so no, I do know Scala, and, likely, I know it better than you do. There's one thing that kills Scala claim to be functional language - it runs on JVM, and there is no tail call optimisation guarantee. Scala compiler optimises statically resolvable tail recursion, but it does not optimise generic tail calls, therefore more complex recursion schemes are impossible to implement without running out of stack. Also, OCaml and F# are not "functional", they are functional-first, but also contain a ton of imperative features which are absolutely mandatory for them to be useful at all.
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