Comment by Bilirubino

The OCaml syntax was discussed a long time ago between the developers and the whole community and the agreement was that the community is happy with the current/original syntax. ReasonML was created for those developers more familiar with Javascript, but it was not very successful in attracting new developers as they usually look more at the semantics of the language along with the syntax (and that is where OCaml's type system shines). Strictly speaking, there is a long list of ML family languages that share many properties of OCaml's syntax. However, what is a ‘reasonable’ syntax is open to debate. Javascript and Python were not mainstream languages when Ocaml was developed and it made much more sense to create a syntax in line with the ML family of powerful languages available at the time. Once you program a bit in OCaml syntax is not a problem, learning to program in a functional paradigm and getting the most out of it is the real challenge.