> Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me on Swift instead of ocaml, SML, or F#? I don't think the industry is likely to adopt

> Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me on Swift instead of ocaml, SML, or F#? I don't think the industry is likely to adopt functional languages. What people in the industry seem to want are safer programs with better null handling (e.g. optionals), friendly handling of async programming (e.g. futures/promises/async await), map/filter/reduce, immutable data types, and similar features that make programs safer and easier to write. Yet, the industry does not want to give up the object-oriented paradigm or the ability to do non-functional-programming stuff. I think the future of programming languages is going to be hybrid languages rather than functional languages, simply because they are easier to adopt. In some cases, existing languages are absorbing those new features, so many companies are benefitting from them without switching languages. Of the alternatives you mentioned, F# is the closest to being a hybrid language because of its integration with the .NET platform. Similar languages include Scala, JavaScript, Java since Java 8, Swift, Kotlin, etc. Python now has some of this stuff too. On the other hand, Go is notable for rejecting functional features and it is also growing in popularity.