Yes Edward was a big contributor here (full disclosure - I work at DA). A lot of our engineers, like Edward, come from the Haskell community. DAML uses the GHC compiler under the covers. One way to think of is is a GHC frontend that adds the extra bits required to streamline the task of writing multipartry contracts.

To answer the other part of your question, DAML stands for Digital Asset Modeling Language. No relationship with ML (apart from its influence in functional programming, of course).