Caveat emptor: Standard ML is not widely used in industry and does not have a large library ecosystem, so if you do recommend it to clients, make sure it's clea

Caveat emptor: Standard ML is not widely used in industry and does not have a large library ecosystem, so if you do recommend it to clients, make sure it's clear that they'd want to follow up with something like Scala or Ocaml, which have far more users/libraries. It's just that for really understanding functional programming, Standard ML is fantastically clear. (Although actually, that Scala coursera course I linked to above is by Martin Odersky, and is also pretty darn good, especially if you're already committed to the JVM.) Others have mentioned Elixir, which would also be an interesting option to explore. The main difference being that with Elixir you're leveraging Erlang and BEAM (which gives you a fantastic platform for actors and lightweight threads), versus Java and the JVM in the case of Scala (which gives you access to all of Java).