ml

Is Standard ML as good as everyone makes it out to be or is it just an over-hyped academic language?

of all the academic languages, it has the easiest high performance implementation, so it is more practical in that sense. Also the static typing helps the code scale.

OCaml has a more powerful type system.

>>1
SML / Ocaml / Haskell are definetly worth learning. I am not biased for anyone. but I recommend you ocaml, because it should be what a language for userland should be, and if more people get on it, probably inria will fix its only problem... the concurrency.

And ATS implements all the good things about ML correctly.
Compile times are fast and efficient.