OCaml

So I'm looking at OCaml, but I'm having some reservations.

First is the relationship with Haskell. They seem to share some of the same ideas, with Haskell being the more `modern' language, but OCaml being more pragmatic. Has Haskell mostly obsoleted OCaml, or do they occupy separate niches?

Then there's the general suitability. I'm not too taken with the syntax, it seems verbose, yet not particularly readable, and in fact rather confused and arbitrary. And the people who use it always seem to feel the need to point out that they used some fraction or another of the lines of code a corresponding program written in C did, which strikes me as a kind of insecurity.

Has anybody used OCaml in a situation where it shined? Is it good for anything but parsers?


main = putStrLn let_in
   
let_in =let in'let'in=let in let in" let" in
         let in let
    let'in let_ _in =
      let_>>_in in
     in'let'in++
            let in_let'in=let
                  in " let in let" in let'in
  in_let'in in'let'in