There are loads of languages like that, I don't think that you can blame rms for this. For example, the MLs are currently kinda hot, ocaml especially, and have

There are loads of languages like that, I don't think that you can blame rms for this. For example, the MLs are currently kinda hot, ocaml especially, and have been around for donkey's years; but in the early 1990s they were very slow. Lots of the applications written in ML are barely viable; the only reason they're performant now is due to Moore's law.