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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned to Mark when I saw this, and he noted it in the addendum at the end, that calling Standard ML dead is a bit too much. I've written recently [0] about how active it surprisingly is.

I also disagree that its failure to "succeed" has anything to do with syntax or semantics and solely that it doesn't have a Jane Street or any company publicly behind it.

[0] https://notes.eatonphil.com/standard-ml-in-2020.html

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I would like to point out that the article does not use the words “succeed” or “fail”, and makes no claim about whether SML “succeeded” or “failed”. Indeed I don't think that is a useful question to ask.

My article was trying to address a much less nebulous issue: what problems did I personally see with SML in the mid 1990s that let me to abandon it at that time.

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. I may just have gotten the wrong impression of your intent.

Any criticism of any language is valid and good to have!

I do wonder if differences in language governance models impact uptake. Being completely biased (having worked on the SML/NJ compiler a long while ago), I very badly want to see more adoption. There is definitely continuing activity with new (IFL award winning) LLVM backend work [1] and Manticore.

[1] http://cs.uchicago.edu/news/smlnj-overhaul/

I don’t think it succeeded or failed. Languages don’t need to be wildly popular in industry to be valuable. I personally like that industry ignores SML. Even for Ocaml I don’t use the Jane street core: I just use the stock language since it’s small and stable. I like that Jane street helps improve the core compiler though.

Haskell's motto is "avoid success at all costs", after all.

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