Well, no. Because the distance, especially the idiomatic distance, between C and Java is much more than the distance between F# and Ocaml. The core languages of both are essentially equivalent. Ocaml and F# have diverged a fair bit in their fringes/exotic features (I can go into this in more detail) but if the bulk of your code use the more humdrum features then going between the two is trivial.
A more apt analogy would be to consider two languages that extend C in different ways but for which the core of C can be used in both with almost no modification (D & C++?). I suppose a python/jython/ironpython comparison would be more accurate.
p.s. with respect to grandparent, I don't subscribe to the philosophy of casting everything in terms of winner take all wars.
I wonder if there'll be any effect from the fact that ML is now going to be the language used in CMU's intro CS course. They produce quite a few CS students, so there will be a cohort with at least basic familiarity with ML.
I play around with Haskell quite a bit, but not so much ML. Do you know why ML won out at CMU?
I'm reading Cousineau's "The Functional Approach to Programming", which is based on ML, and I end up just translating most things into Haskell--the syntax feels much cleaner to me.
As far as research goes, CMU and Princeton are (as far as I know) the two ML strongholds in the US, with functional-programming research at most other departments dominated by Haskell. So I imagine the faculty were in favor of ML. The new course (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15150/) is being taught by Robert Harper, author of the book Programming in Standard ML (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/introsml/).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429082
ML may have lost the war, but from an academic and educational standpoint, folks in the ML community still have a lot to bring to the table.