I've tried learning PureScript, Haskell, and OCaml in the past and failed miserably.

I'm currently learning SML for a college course and I'm finally groking a language with ML heritage. I'm surprised SML never really went anywhere. I find the syntax much "gentler" compared to OCaml.

SML is probably my favourite programming language, and ML for the Working Programmer is probably my favourite programming book. It is indeed sad to think that I'll probably never use it seriously or even meet another SML programmer in my life (I met one at university in a larger city once, but it seems unlikely to happen again where I am now).

OCaml is good, though I personally dislike its complexity compared to SML ("Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." and all that). There are also remote OCaml jobs in the world, so it's not completely impossible I could do something like that in the future.

What if some wrote an implementation that targeted something like the Erlang Virtual machine? It be a herculean effort.

It's a really nice language, but there's no tooling for it.

I’m guessing you’ve referring to what https://caramel.run/ could’ve been?

I think Gleam is pretty good enough to get that typed feel on the BEAM.

SML feels pretty different compared to OCaml.

Interesting but quite old. F# is up to version 7 now but this article only uses 3.