OCaml: First impressions

The Why

I’m somewhat of a language nerd to begin with, and it was Rust that originally got me interested in the whole functional paradigm.
Not due to it’s lineage, but the heavy use of chained iterator methods in favor over traditional loops. This is one of the more intimidating hurdles
for newcomers to the language, but after getting used to it, rarely will you see anyone write a for loop again.

Rant: The argument can be made that what I’m talking about is more similar to Javascript-land where a bunch of pseudo-functional methods and terminology are
used, but it in reality is as far away from functional programming as useState() would imply it is.
At least Rust has a few things to back it up, as at least a language that will support you should you desire to write pure functional code. I would argue that for beginners, Rust will simply force you to write functional, immutable code, whether they really understand it or otherwise, as the amount of .clone()‘ing required for a newcomer to compile a non-trivial program will practically almost guarantee that nothing was actually &mutated*.

So this got me interested in watching some GOTO, strangeloop, and other conference talks about functional programming, and upon discovering @artemslab
(definitely go check it out, awesome content) on YouTube and watching some in-depth videos about Ocaml and it’s runtime integer representations and memory
allocation, that really got me fascinated with the language.

In the past, I typically wouldn’t hesitate to sudo pacman -Sy whatever compiler or interpreter I needed, to get started playing around with a new language I was interested in. However since getting full-time employment, on top of the existing OSS stuf