The fact that the implementation is the spec is a large part of the issue. Someone feels like adding a feature, so they just tack it on somewhere until the lang

The fact that the implementation is the spec is a large part of the issue. Someone feels like adding a feature, so they just tack it on somewhere until the language has a million syntactic features littered everywhere. The experimentation aspect is nice, but to me, the final product is an unwieldy Frankenstein (though still better than many more popular languages). http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/ http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/ SML is nice enough as is, but the progress with Successor ML to gradually add the best of Ocaml on top is a very appealing option. As a personal gripe, both languages need better Unicode support.