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You make an excellent point about the primacy of the community. I can't remember where I first came across the idea that languages are communities, possibly Ri

You make an excellent point about the primacy of the community. I can't remember where I first came across the idea that languages are communities, possibly Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software. As someone about to embark on the Standard ML learning curve (motivated primarily by Ur/Web - Ur is a ML-like language), it is striking that the SML community is fragmented to the point of non-existence (not even a Planet SML, the sml-list is dead, & the SML subreddit is pretty lifeless). Looking at Alice ML which has significant advancements over both Objective and Standard ML, it has great features, but no momentum which isn't helped by the fact that there hasn't been a release since 2007.

anon_d 15y ago
Looking at Alice ML which has significantly more features than ... FTFY My favorite thing about SML is that it only has known-good features.
ankrgyl 15y ago
I learned a lot of SML in college, and it is really a great language. In my opinion it has the best syntax and REPL of any language I've used. But Haskell has a much better chance of becoming main stream. The type classes allow things like drop-in, easy-to-use hash maps and a simple, type-safe print statement (SML's requires explicit string conversions). Furthermore, GHC consistently pushes modern features; my current favorites are the extremely performant userspace threads (managed by epoll). From what I can tell, the SML folks are more focused on PL research projects than trying to implement a standard library, which is completely fine. If everything goes well and we as a community build intuitions for strong, static typing, one of these good languages (IMO probably Haskell) could end up as the next Python. BTW, if you're looking for resources on learning SML, I'd look at Bob Harper's books (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/)
- evangineer 15y ago
  Thanks, I had already downloaded the latest version of Harper's Programming in Standard ML. I think you're right about the SML folks' focus on PL research.

anon_d 15y ago

Looking at Alice ML which has significantly more features than ... FTFY My favorite thing about SML is that it only has known-good features.

ankrgyl 15y ago

I learned a lot of SML in college, and it is really a great language. In my opinion it has the best syntax and REPL of any language I've used. But Haskell has a much better chance of becoming main stream. The type classes allow things like drop-in, easy-to-use hash maps and a simple, type-safe print statement (SML's requires explicit string conversions). Furthermore, GHC consistently pushes modern features; my current favorites are the extremely performant userspace threads (managed by epoll). From what I can tell, the SML folks are more focused on PL research projects than trying to implement a standard library, which is completely fine. If everything goes well and we as a community build intuitions for strong, static typing, one of these good languages (IMO probably Haskell) could end up as the next Python. BTW, if you're looking for resources on learning SML, I'd look at Bob Harper's books (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/)

evangineer 15y ago
Thanks, I had already downloaded the latest version of Harper's Programming in Standard ML. I think you're right about the SML folks' focus on PL research.