The most appropriate languages for ML should really be functional first, statically typed languages like OCaml or F# or maybe Scala. The problem might be that

The most appropriate languages for ML should really be functional first, statically typed languages like OCaml or F# or maybe Scala. The problem might be that many people doing ML don't really know how to program beyond a basic level, and at first glance a language like Python seems "easier". But they get by anyway since the difficult part of ML is often not really the programming as such, and if your program is just a 100 line script calling Tensorflow then any language can work, however annoying it may be.