mlton seems to be used for optimized compilation for releases, while general development is typically done in another SML environment, such as smlnj. I don't h

mlton seems to be used for optimized compilation for releases, while general development is typically done in another SML environment, such as smlnj. I don't have really concrete experience with SML, just OCaml, which also has its share of warts. It's a fantastic language in certain niches, though; generally, the sort of niches for which dynamic / "scripting" languages are usually a poor fit. (I wouldn't write a serious compiler in Python, for example.) They're very complementary. I think the ML family has a lot of advantages, but the community is pretty closely tied to academia (much like Haskell, but without the buzz). While that in itself is probably neither good nor bad, in this case a lot of the terminology used is especially math-y; There are many features ML has that programmers would find tremendously useful, except they're usually discussed using Greek letters, which is insular. I got a copy of The Definition of Standard ML from Amazon, hoping to get further insight into the language's design, and found it completely impenetrable. (Then again, I'm not a grad student.) Newer languages seem to be using type inference (finally!), but as far as I know, nobody has really ran with the design of its module system.