I'm curious what advantages you think Haskell has over ML/Ocaml. I'm pretty familiar with OCaml and like it a lot, and Haskell seems to be very similar, but I haven't used it for anything substantive. What benefits, if any, does Haskell have over Ocaml, and is it worth learning if one already knows Ocaml? I know that Haskell has lazy evaluation while Ocaml doesn't, but you can simulate lazy evaluation in Ocaml.
I actually also really love OCaml. It has some truly brilliant features which Haskell lacks like polymorphic variants (and structural sub-typing in general) and a top-notch module system. (Much unlike Haskell's "worst-in-class" module system.)
Haskell does have a bunch of advantages though. A pretty petty one is syntax: Haskell's is simpler, prettier, more consistent and yet more flexible. They're very similar, of course, but I think Haskell gets all the little details right where OCaml often doesn't.
The single biggest advantage Haskell has--more than enough to offset the module system, I think--is typeclasses. Typeclasses subsume many of the uses of modules, but can be entirely inferred. This moves many libraries from being too awkward, inconvenient and ugly to use to being a breeze. A great example is QuickCheck: it's much more pleasant to write property-based tests in Haskell because the type system can infer how to generate inputs from the types. Being able to dispatch based on return type is also very useful for basic abstractions like monads. Beyond this, you can also do neat things like recursive typeclass instances and multi-parameter typeclasses.
Honestly, if I was forced to pick a single Haskell feature as the most important, I would probably choose typeclasses. They're extremely simple and a foundation for so much of Haskell's libraries and features. Most importantly, typeclasses are probably the most obvious way the type system goes from just preventing bugs to actually helping you write code and making the language more expressive, in a way that a dynamically typed language fundamentally cannot replicate.
Laziness in Haskell is not really a big deal. It can make much of your code simpler, but it also makes dealing with some performance issues a bit trickier. It also tends to make all your code more modular; take a look at "Why Functional Programming Matters"[1]. I am personally a fan of having laziness by default, but I think it's ultimately a matter of philosophy.
And philosophy, coincidentally, is another reason to learn Haskell: it takes the underlying ideas of functional programming further than OCaml. In Haskell, everything is functional and even the non-functional bits are defined in terms of functional programming. Many "functional" languages are actually imperative languages which support some functional programming features. OCaml is one of the few that goes beyond this, but there is really a qualitative difference when you go all the way.
Once you know that everything is functional by default, you can move code around with impunity. You on longer have to worry about the order code gets evaluated in or even if it gets evaluated at all. You also worry far less about proper tail calls, which mostly compensates for having to deal with some laziness issues.
Haskell also embraces the philosophy in another way: you tend to operate on functions like data even more than in OCaml. The immediately obvious example is that Haskell has a function composition operator in the Prelude. There is no reason for OCaml to not have this, but--as far as I know--it doesn't. It's an illustration of the philosophical differences between the two languages. On the same note, Haskell also tends to use a whole bunch of other higher-order abstractions like functors and applicatives.
So I think the most compelling difference is ultimately fairly abstract: Haskell just has a different philosophy than OCaml. This ends up reflected in the libraries, language design and common idioms and thus in your code. I think that by itself is a very good reason to learn Haskell even if you know OCaml; and since you do, picking Haskell up will be relatively easy!
That was a great reply. I would personally like to hear more about the advantages OCaml has. OCaml was my first foray into functional programming but I was really put off by +., print_int and friends (which you obviously don't need in Haskell). I know about functors but what else is so bad about Haskells module system? The biggest weakness of it I see is the inability to handle recursive imports.
