having done some OCaml and F#, where F#’s syntax is more like reason, i think it is pretty clear that OCaml is a fascinating language but what does impose some weird syntactic work that both reason and f# relieve you of. probably to someone sufficiently used to ocaml it doesn’t matter but it can hurt adoption
I don't see how you can say F#'s syntax is more like Reason. OCaml and F# have nearly identical syntax for the core language, with the few differences being:
1) places features diverged
2) modules
3) F#'s "light" syntax mode
None of these really seem like Reason at all. Do you have any specific places where they're similar?
I always thought ReasonML was just a more JavaScript-ish syntax on top of OCaml, not necessarily better but just different. In what ways is it an actual improvement?