Comment by le-mark
I think there are more succinct snippets in here and some this more verbose exposition is for pedagogical purposes. I am not a fan of ocaml because tacking on the object syntax made SML more verbose (ugly imo). Looks like 0xcaml continued trend.
OxCaml is OCaml, it is only a set of language extensions that Jane Street expects eventually being able to upstream, depending on the experience.