Standard ML is my favorite language, bar none. It contains so many ideas that are obviously the Right Thing in retrospect, like parametric polymorphism, algebraic data types, pattern matching, Hindley-Milner type inference, etc. The ideas added by ML's successors, like OCaml and Haskell, seem much more iffy and debatable in comparison.

Maybe the page should also mention Concurrent ML? It's basically the right solution to the problem that Go is fumbling toward.

Why is Concurrent ML's solution to concurrency better than Alice ML's ?

I don't really know if CML style (rendezvous) is better or worse than Alice ML style (futures). If you have any good references on that, please let me know :-)

It just seems to me that Go went with the former style, but made some mistakes that CML managed to avoid, e.g. Go doesn't garbage-collect a thread that's blocked on a channel whose other end went out of scope.

Interestingly enough, SML is taught in the intro class at my school. It's the first programming language I learned.

The Programming Languages course on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/course/proglang) spends about a third of the course on SML before moving on to Racket and Ruby. It might be of interest to others who want a somewhat introductory course which uses ML.

Greatly suggest to try sml through this course. I'll never forget it.

I took this class two years ago and loved it. Of all the instructors of the Coursera classes I have taken, Dan Grossman is easily the most interesting and engaging. Highly recommend.

Do you think it's given you a permanently unusual perspective on coding?

I think so. I feel like I naturally think recursively when approaching problems whereas most people think iteratively.

https://github.com/SMLFamily/The-Definition-of-Standard-ML-R... in case anyone else is hitting the GoDaddy landing page...

The Web Archive gives this for the URL:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140815065806/http://sml-family....

and from looking at github, it seems that the most recent intended content of the site can be seen at:

http://rawgit.com/SMLFamily/SMLFamily.github.io/master/index...

Do people still use ML? It has some historic significance as a programming language but seems completely irrelevant now (although still taught as part of the University of Cambridge CS course).

In interactive theorem proving HOL4 (http://hol.sourceforge.net/) and Isabelle (http://isabelle.in.tum.de/) are written in SML and are actively developed.

OCaml is used to some extent. Most notable industry user of an ML (in the form of OCaml) is probably Jane Street Capital.

F# is an ML descendent.