I think functional languages historically have much better type systems but recently, more procedural languages have taken a lot of those innovations and integrated them (e.g. typescript, rust)

The simply-typed lambda-calculus [01940] predated Abadi and Cardelli's object-calculus or sigma-calculus [01996] by 56 years, and both of those have trouble with side effects; the kind of non-sharing thread-safety guarantees Rust's type system can provide for mutable data structures stem from Jean-Yves Girard's "linear logic" [01987] and Wadler's "linear types" [01990], although Reynolds published a POPL paper in 01978 that we can recognize in retrospect as having invented a Rust-like affine typing system.

I've never been able to make heads or tails of Girard's paper but http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/slides/fpottier-2007-05-l... is an introductory divulgation of some of the pre-Rust history of this stuff. It makes me think I should read Wadler's 01990 paper.

So I think functional languages kind of had a head start, but also in a sense they have an easier problem to solve. ML's type system doesn't even have subtyping, much less mutation and resource leak safety.

Thanks, that presentation is absolutely fascinating!

> What examples of static typing with OO or procedural languages that are only a "pleasure to work with" can we look at ?

OCaml and Rust would fit the bill. You can do procedural and OO in both. You could add Scala to that. I think the conclusion is not that "functional is better than OO" but "they both have their strength and are not mutually exclusive".

You could add Nim [1] to that list. Many people say it has "the ergonomics of Python but the strong static typing of C++/Rust."

[1] https://nim-lang.org

In additional to what others have mentioned (OCaml has OOP), Kotlin is very good. It's not as expressive as ML-family languages, but sealed classes + null safety + type inference makes for a very fluid, almost dynamic programming experience that still has strong guarantees.

OCaml and F# are functional first multi paradigm languages. They’re perfectly fine being used for OOP.