[tempodox]

I can't speak for others, but from a purely practical and non-academic point of view, I chose OCaml over SML because it's painless and easy to produce a standalone binary executable. Most SML implementations seem to be able to do that too, but require me to write compiler-specific glue code, IIRC. I don't want to have to dive into compiler internals to produce an executable. Also, I appreciate that the OCaml maintainers are not afraid to provide useful syntactic sugar although it may not seem “real FP”, like the `for` loop for instance. I seldom use the OO extension, but support for virtual methods can be very handy at times. You can implement the mechanics for those with functors too, but it's just more code to write that way.