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johnnyjeans | 8 months ago

> the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way

mlton allows you to use a keyword to get the same facility for function overloading that is used for addition and equality. it's disabled by default for hygienic reasons, function overloading shouldn't be abused.

https://baturin.org/code/mlton-overload/

> labelled arguments

generally speaking if my functions are large enough for this to matter, i'd rather be passing around refs to structures so refactoring is easier.

> polymorphic variants

haven't really missed them.

> GADTs

afaik being able to store functors inside of modules would fix this (and I think sml/nj supports this), but SML's type system is more than capable of expressing virtual machines in a comfortable way with normal ADTs. if i wanted to get that cute with the type system, i'd probably go the whole country mile and reach for idris.

> even the much-maligned object system that have their place

never used it.

> Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?

mlton is whole-program optimizing (and very good at it)[1], has a much better FFI[2][3], is much less opinionated as a language, and the parallelism is about 30 years ahead[4]. the most important feature to me is that sml is more comfortable to use over ocaml. being nicer syntactically matters, and that increases in proportion with the amount of code you have to read and write. you dont go hiking in flip flops. as a knock-on effect, that simplicitly in sml ends up with a language that allows for a lot more mechanical sympathy.

all of these things combine for me, as an engineer, to what's fundamentally a more pragmatic language. the french have peculiar taste in programming languages, marseille prolog is also kind of weird. ocaml feels quirky in the same way as a french car, and i don't necessarily want that from a tool.

[1] - http://www.mlton.org/Performance

[2] - http://www.mlton.org/ForeignFunctionInterface

[3] - http://www.mlton.org/MLNLFFIGen

[4] - https://sss.cs.purdue.edu/projects/multiMLton/mML/Documentat...

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vkazanov|8 months ago

I love, love, love StandardML.

I respect the sheer power of what mlton does. The language itself is clean, easy to understand, reads better than anything else out there, and is also well-formalised. I read (enjoyed!) the tiger book before I knew anything about SML.

Sadly, this purism (not as in Haskell but as a vision) is what probably killed it. MLTon or not, the language needed to evolve, expand, rework the stdlib, etc.

But authors were just not interested in the boring part of language maintenance.