A super awesome type system is worthless without the basic requirements for scalable software development.
Ocaml is billed as the pragmatic ML, but the syntax really sucks and nominally typed structs aren't nearly as good. They also have 3 competing standard libraries.
Haskell is too ivory tower. Most devs simply can't be bothered.
StandardML is that awesome middle. The language choices are pragmatic compared to haskell (mutable refs, side effects, and not lazy). The syntax is super simple and consistent (unlike ocaml). The concurrent ML extensions offer good multi-threading (still waiting on ocaml). The mlton compiler is very fast. There's only one standard library and it's decent. The big thing holding the language back is third-party libraries. If Google threw their millions at SML instead of go, SML really would be better in every way.
OCaml structs are structurally typed.
> They also have 3 competing standard libraries.
There is only one standard library, stdlib.
F# seems to meet all of that except that native static compilation isn't the default (but is available).
Define sane syntax. C-like abomination? At least unlike C it's unambiguous.
