SML is one of my favorite languages (I've been (very) slowly writing a compiler & language server for it).

Sure, it has some warts/differences compared to newer languages - we have moved towards traits/typeclasses/etc, and I wish I could just write #[derive(Debug) - but I feel that SML fits in a very unique spot for programming languages. It's extremely simple, yet still powerful and expressive. I hope we will see continued work on SML/Successor ML descendants (like 1ML, etc), because I think there's still potential there

I think some updated language tooling would dramatically help.