[mahmud]

I have been programming for over 20 years, most of it in FP land. ML is tractable, a beautiful prism through which one can peek at Computer Science as a subject, but it has a frustrating lack of _practical_ tooling and beginner-friendly community. For anything outside basic I/O, you will need to dust off compiler-specific extensions, most of them last used on "Un*x Workstations".

Just look at the Basis library. Safe to say it's nowhere near Racket, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, ...

http://sml-family.org/Basis/manpages.html

[shados]

Using ML trough ReasonML + BuckleScript and the related tooling should make ML palatable.

Alternatively, F#. That fixes the tooling issue pronto.

[tytytytytytytyt]

I never understood why a lack of tooling would be a serious problem for a language used for teaching FP.

[yawaramin]

It's a tough sell if the language has no hope of industry adoption. Also tough to use a language, especially one with type inference, without editor support.

[tytytytytytytyt]

Most people in my SML class seemed to have no problem with either of those.

[yawaramin]

Maybe some classes are just that good. A lot aren't, I'm guessing, and you would want to at least take away something you could use in the real world from them.

[jackmott]

F# or OCaml then.