[chriswarbo]

"Lisp" is pretty broad. Whilst it was inspired by Lambda Calculus (the core of most FP languages), a lot of Lisp code is quite imperative (loops, mutable variables, control flow separate from data flow (e.g. exceptions/errors), etc.).

Scheme (and its dialects/descendants) tend to stick to a more functional style (although they also like to do stack-gymnastics with continuations, etc.). Many courses are based around Lisp.

One of the main features of the ML family is static typing, with algebraic datatypes, pattern-matching, etc. (i.e. the stuff that new languages like to call "modern", because they first saw it in Swift or something). That gives a useful mathematical perspective on code ("denotational semantics", i.e. giving meaning to what's written; as opposed to the common "operational semantics" of what it made my laptop do), and having type checking and inference makes it easier to do generic and higher-order programming (dynamic languages make that trivial in-the-small, but can make large systems painful to implement/debug/maintain/understand). This course seems to take such abstraction seriously, since it covers modules and functors too (which are another big feature of the ML family).

NOTE: In ML, the words "functor" and "applicative functor" tend to mean something very different (generic, interface-based programming) to their use in similar languages like Haskell (mapping functions over data, and sequencing actions together)