[munchler]

As a professional who uses F# every day, I appreciate this answer, even though it concerns me. Separating concepts from practical details is worthwhile, but can be taken too far. I think the FP community probably focuses a bit too much on theory. I would encourage you to consider teaching a more practical language, like F#, in the future.

[bfors]

I feel like F#'s commercial viability over other more computer sciencey FP languages is actually kind of a downside, from a "vibe" perspective. It seems like CS folks are not generally very interested in moving more towards the software engineering end of the discipline. Which is fair, because they are different things.

[zem]

i think someone with a good grounding in sml could get proficient ocaml or f# in under a month. sml is absolutely the right language to teach a course like this in.

[munchler]

I agree with your first sentence, but the second one surprises me. If the practical language and the impractical one are that similar, why pick the impractical one?

[zem]

sml is a smaller language, and a "cleaner" one in some ways. if your goal is to teach students the elements of functional programming, you want them to be able to concentrate on the core concepts, and not on the incidental details of the language.

http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/ is a very good overview of the differences between sml and ocaml, which lets you see some of the tradeoffs each language has made.