[zmanian]

The best argument for John's thesis is the proliferation of ML derivatives in industry: Swift, Rust and Facebook's Hack. I'm really looking to Facebook's Flow which adds an ML style type system to Javascript.

[jonsterling]

I would be very cautious about saying "popularity" or "proliferation" suggest that something is good. The ML family happens to have proliferated very nicely, but this is not why it is good.

[frowaway001]

I'd probably add Scala, too.

Syntactically it's a bit different, but from a modularity POV it is much closer to ML than Swift, Rust or Hack.