Note that what I am about to say is *not* intended as a criticism of
OCaml; I use OCaml every day, and enjoy using it.

Jean-Christophe Filliatre writes:
> > 1. Current functional languages do not have enough library support:
> 
> Please. ocaml has  the most wonderful standard library  that any other
> language  has ever had.  Have a  look in  the reference  manual before
> stating such non-sense.

As much as I enjoy using OCaml, I think that this may be overstating
the case.  OCaml has a very good standard library that is very well
documented; however, it does not have everything.  Just a few examples
of things that are missing from the standard library:

* Parsing and manipulating RFC 822 mail headers
* Parsing and manipulating MIME documents
* Parsing and downloading URLs
* A FTP client
* An HTTP Server
* An HTTP Client
* An IMAP Client
* An SMTP Client
* A POP Client
* A NNTP Client
* A Telnet Client
* Parsing, manipulating, and generating HTML
* Parsing, manipulating, and generating SGML
* Audio data creation and manipulation
* Image data creation and manipulation
* High-level file operations (copy file, copy directory tree, 
  delete directory tree)

Now, one could justifiably argue that such things don't belong in the
standard library, but current a lot of programmers expect things like
this to be in the standard library; this list, for instance, was
generated by quickly scanning the Python documentation, and the Perl
and Java libraries include similar functionality.

It is true that many of these things can be obtained by downloading
contributed packages for OCaml, but that's an extra step that
programmers accustomed to other languages may not bother with when
evaluating OCaml.  They want a quick solution to their specific
problems, and if they don't have to program large chunks of that
solution because some other language includes that functionality in
their standard library, they'll happily use *that* language.

I personally will happily continue to use OCaml for very practical
reasons, and I will continue to recommend to other programmers, but I
will not fool myself into thinking it is perfect and that no-one will
need things that it doesn't currently provide out-of-the-box.

[As a side note, I must commend the OCaml team on their documentation
of the language and standard libraries; every time I have to referee
to the documentation I am impressed again by how succinctly yet
clearly the documentation is written, and by how well organized it
is.]
-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkb@tkb.mpl.com