Interesting project. Ever since being exposed to a bit of Standard ML (which never had much of a "real-world" standard library, as far as I could figure out), I always wanted to like OCaml, but couldn't quite get over the odd syntax.

It's been a while, but taking a look at this comparison of SML and OCaml again:

http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html

It feels a bit like you've landed in some strange neither-or space for Reason? I'm not sure if it would make sense to bend OCaml into being a subset of SML or not (I know there are some differences, just not sure how much those require different syntax, or if they do) - but did you consider moving more toward SML?

I can see the reasoning between going from <> to != and <- to = (there are more programming languages, and more programmers now, than ever before, and whatever the merits of using = for comparison, almost all other languages in common use now have it as an assignment operator (even if it is still a source of bugs a la: "if(a=0) ...")).

It's exiting times with Elixir and Lisp Flavoured Erlang for Erlang, and now Reason for OCaml (and to some extent various dialects, languages and DSLs for Javascript, like typescript, coffee script and JSX for React).