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> It's a pity. SML is in many ways a joy to work with. The language doesn't change, which is a nice thing in itself in the current climate, but it has many thin

> It's a pity. SML is in many ways a joy to work with. The language doesn't change, which is a nice thing in itself in the current climate, but it has many things people still look for in modern languages (type inference, pattern matching, a module system). Multiple compliant compilers are available that produce fast code. The syntax is delightful, relying on neither brace delimiters nor syntactic whitespace. is it now ? Caml has been taught for a long time to a lot of to-be engineering students in france, and it was frankly almost universally hated ; likewise for people that are taught LISP.

cannam 8y ago
> is it now ? Well of course I think so, since I said it... But - > Caml has been taught for a long time to a lot of to-be engineering students in france, and it was frankly almost universally hated It's possible to wonder why a language like SML doesn't get more use outside academia, since so many people have been taught it as students. And it seems a reasonable explanation that many people who were taught these languages simply disliked the experience. If you're forced to learn a weird non-procedural language with no obvious application and a super-picky type checker that you can't understand, why would you like it? I had a vaguely similar experience myself, when taught SML as a student in the 90s. I enjoyed it as an exercise, but by the end of the course I still didn't have any useful intuition for how to write a whole program in it. Meanwhile over on the C++ course, the object/procedural mix seemed to make more obvious sense as a way to structure things. Now, after years working in C++, I think of SML as the easier language and in many ways more natural.