book

I don't know what you are looking for when you compare things to SLIME but I was quite satisfied with the setup they suggest in realworldocaml: https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wiki/Installation-Ins... * OPAM for package management * Utop for a REPL * merlin for autocomplete and type queries * ocp-indent for aotomatic indentation

I spent a little time with Haskell and gave up because progress was slow. Later I picked up Ocaml and found many of the concepts to be similar but had a much easier time making progress. Having used Ocaml to familiarize myself with strongly typed FP, I think it wouldn't be so hard now to go back to Haskell and have more success. If you decide to give it a try, I highly recommend Real World Ocaml [1] as a starting point, especially the installation instructions that help you get up and running with a sane toolchain right away [2]. [1]: http://realworldocaml.org/ [2]: https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wiki/Installation-Ins...

On the other hand, if you want to do something else in addition to a prime sieve than some sensible advice on tooling can save a lot of grief down the road. A couple of years ago I decided to learn Ocaml but never progressed much farther than writing a couple of Project Euler problems. Recently I decided to relearn Ocaml with the Real World Ocaml[1] book and, in retrospect, one of my favorite things about the book is their recommendations on tooling[2]. The improved REPL and the vim plugin they recommend are the sort of thing that make learning the language and its libraries much more pleasant but are also the sort of thing I wouldn't think of installing on my own if all you told me to install was the compiler (which kind of explains why I never went very far in my previous attempt at learning the language). [1] http://realworldocaml.org/

> I have the impression that the OCaml world has seen a lot of changes recently with a lot of complexity added. The first part of that is very true but the second part feels completely and utterly false to me. Where is this added complexity? OCaml and OPAM were ridiculously trivial to set up on my system (via homebrew on a Mac) and OPAM 1.2, with many improvements, is due for release in the next few days [1]. Decent instructions are in the RWO wiki page [2]. The OPAM devs are responsive to bug reports and do a lot to maintain the health of the package ecosystem too. If you're installing everything from sources then you're choosing to take on that burden and I wish you well but don't claim that more complexity is being added. [1] beta announcement: https://opam.ocaml.org/blog/opam-1-2-0-beta4/ [2] https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wi