ml like languages are THE perfect languages for working with xml. The algebraic datatypes which you spend the majority of your time creating in them are xml dtd

ml like languages are THE perfect languages for working with xml. The algebraic datatypes which you spend the majority of your time creating in them are xml dtd's. The functions you create are xsl transformations. The compiler doesn't allow you to make silly mistakes in any part of your code. See cduce and ocamlduce which are completely based around the idea of xml. More generally they best suited for "symbolic" programming, compilers being the main example. They don't offer much when you're doing a few things with an api or numeric code (python and numpy are better in that case because of their libraries and because you don't need the additional safety of types when writing small programs/scripts),