I don't think AnimalMuppet is confusing most popular with best. But as you don't have the data required to conclude which language is better by any meaningful metric, anyway, then your claim is just wishful thinking. If ML had won and Java lost, one could have just as easily said that ML was holding programming back from some imagined benefit Java would have brought. I think that it is you who are confusing "an interesting perspective" with a value judgment. Yes, ML had pattern matching before Java, while Java had pervasive dynamic linking and dynamic code loading. Those are simple facts and perhaps "an interesting perspective," but how do you decide which is better?

Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages. The big lacuna of PL research ...

If popularity mattered ... PHP, JavaScript etc.

I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating.

> Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages.

Right, so as "better" and "best" are unknown, we should stop using those terms. I like Java and I like ML, but I don't know that one of them is better than the other, and if so which.

> I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating.

Some of the successful typed languages, sure: Java, C++, C#, but the three heavily influence one another, and at least Java's and C#'s designers were aware of ML. So I don't think that, to the extent this is true, it's some "natural" draw, but rather a direct or indirect influence. On the other hand, you have Go, which is also quite successful (admittedly in a lower tier of success), and it doesn't seem to be converging on something ML-like, though (although it is influenced by another Milner idea), and neither is C.

Absolutely. Popularity is absolutely fallible.

But I don't take claims of "X language was better and should have won" claims very seriously, partly because it's claimed by advocates of so many different languages. Should ML have won, or should Pascal/Modula2/Oberon? I've seen that claim, here, just from different people and for different reasons.

But I also don't take such claims very seriously because, while popularity can be wrong, so can unpopularity. That one guy spouting off about how everyone else is wrong and he's right? Sometimes he is right - but not often. More often, that person who thinks they have the right answer is seeing less than the full picture. I mean, how many people use Java? Several million? Would ML really have been a better answer for the majority of those several million people?

I react the same in government, by the way. When someone says, "I know what you should want, and I'm going to make it happen, even if it isn't what you actually want", well, I trust the people to know what fits them better than someone who isn't in their shoes.