"misleading claims like "if it compiles it works."" ML family of languages contain powerful language features and libraries that, when programmed using particu

"misleading claims like "if it compiles it works."" ML family of languages contain powerful language features and libraries that, when programmed using particular style, can produce programs that actually do that (if they are brief). They are not magic, the point is just that the abstractions used there effectively remove large categories of typical bugs. Of course the language itself is not sufficient, one must study how programs are supposed to be written in the said languages to understand the utilization of those features. Yaron Minsky's "Ocaml for the masses" in http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036 explains this far more better than I could.