Objective-C vs OCaml
When comparing Objective-C vs OCaml, the Slant community recommends OCaml for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” OCaml is ranked 14th while Objective-C is ranked 62nd. The most important reason people chose OCaml is:
Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus. OCaml is in its functional parts almost pure lambda calculus, in a very practical manner: useful for many daily programming tasks. The acitve development makes improvements to the type system like generalized algebraic data types (GADT) or polymorphic variants, so when learning this language you get at once a down to earth usable compiler and advanced abstraction features.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Well Documented
Objective-C's documentation exists on Apple's website, and explains language features in detail.
Pro Develop Apple applications
Similar to C# and Java, but used to develop native applications for Apple hardware.
Pro Objective-C supports an open style of dynamic binding
A style that can accommodate a simple architecture for interactive user interfaces.
Pro Actively-developed functional programming language at the forefront of research
Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus. OCaml is in its functional parts almost pure lambda calculus, in a very practical manner: useful for many daily programming tasks. The acitve development makes improvements to the type system like generalized algebraic data types (GADT) or polymorphic variants, so when learning this language you get at once a down to earth usable compiler and advanced abstraction features.
Pro Encourages functional style
It steers you towards a functional style, but doesn't bother you with purity and "monads everywhere" like other languages, such as Haskell.
Pro No windows!
Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows
Lacks native support for Windows systems.
Pro Sophisticated and easy-to-use package manager
OPAM is a package manager for OCaml, which is really easy to use, just like npm. It creates a .opam folder in home directory.
The documentation is great as well, and you can switch between multiple versions of OCaml for each project. You can also package your project and publish it on OPAM repositories, even if the dependencies do not exists on OPAM.
Pro One of the best for writing compilers
OCaml is compiled to native binary, so it's amazingly fast. Being a member of ML-family languages, it has expressive syntax for trees, and has great LLVM support.
Pro Stable syntax
The syntax is consistent, some syntaxic sugar but at a reasonable level, so reading code of others isn't too much confusing.
Pro Strong editor integration
The merlin
editor tool provides all you need to develop OCaml in your favourite editor.
Cons
Con Odd Syntax
Objective C's syntax is very alien to other languages. Learning Objective-C first will fail to expose you to a syntax style that would be relatively familiar in almost any other language.
Con Might as well learn Swift
Swift works almost anywhere Objective C does, and it was designed to replace Objective C.
Con One of the biggest mistakes ever.
It was meant to be one of the C-style languages, but has such bad syntax design it actually is the odd duck.
Con Apple-centric and obsolete
Con Tied into Apple's eco-system.
Con More Technical
To be able to do basic tasks in Objective-C requires a strong understanding of programming.
Con Requires Understanding of C-language.
Objective-C is built on top of C, and as such, requires at least a basic understanding of how to program in C.
Con Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows
Lacks native support for Windows systems.