[f1shy]

My opinion: marketing. In my experience, if I tell someone „look here is Lisp“ they turn off and roll the eyes with a „ohh that DEAD origramming language“. If I instead say „look this new state of the art language called ML“ I get full attention and respect.

[ajbt200128]

No, it's definitely not because of marketing. SML is more of a dead language than most lisps. SML is used because it has a strong type checker, which is much more conducive to learning, and just having resilient programs in general.