I have heard a lot of great things about OCaml. What I think is really cool about it is it adds OOP capabilities on top of the imperative/declarative-ness of something like SML. I think I am going to write somewhat of a follow up at some point today where I take a look at some of the other languages people recommended looking into, so thank you for your suggestion!

I am also really excited to try a language like SML with an ecosystem. I feel like the weak base, and obscure ecosystem with not a lot of big relevant packages is probably the biggest shortcoming to SML, at least from my understanding from using the language so far. That being said, I think a language that wraps this paradigm into a more industry-ready design, as OCaml aims to achieve, could be very cool and powerful! That being said, I think I will totally be writing some articles on it! Thank you for this awesome suggestion, I appreciate it!