As someone with absolutely zero experience with ML languages of any kind, would this be the best intro for me to get into it? Or would I be better off with OCaml?
Eventually I would learn Ocaml, as it's the more sensible language for most production code (community, tooling, ecosystem, etc.). But there's nothing wrong with learning SML first. 90% of what you learn will be transferable to Ocaml. Starting with SML might help you focus on the "essence" of ML languages rather than getting overwhelmed by the impressive range of options that Ocaml opens up.
The MLton implementation of SML -- while not necessarily the best ML to practice on -- is particularly interesting because it's a whole-program optimizing compiler. It has a reputation for producing very compact, efficient machine code. Having said that, Ocaml is still a comparatively simple language -- compared to say, Haskell or C++ -- and its native compiler is well known for turning out decent and very predictable code (predictable in the sense that you can read some source code and have a decent understanding of what kind of machine code it will get compiled into).
If you decide to learn Ocaml first, but want to stick to "essential ML", I would recommend Jason Hickey's "Introduction to Ocaml" [1] over the more modern "Real World Ocaml" [2], as the latter book introduces every bell and whistle that Ocaml offers, and has a much more ecosystem-dependent focus (third party libraries, third party tooling, etc.). Still a fine book, but I think it emphasizes advanced Ocaml features a bit too much for an introductory text.
Absolutely recommend following gps advice on starting with sml - ocaml has some... Bumps. But the other option would be to just start with the reasonml dialect of ocaml:
> And just FYI, reasonml "is-a" ocaml, so you can also build binaries with the regular compiler back-end - you're not "locked" to targeting js.
The full isomorphism is great. I started with the Reason syntax and when I decided I preferred standard syntax[1], I just use formatting tools to convert my codebases in O(1) effort.
1: Because of tool maturity, and the ecosystem around the standard syntax specifically. I wanted to be able to run `dune utop`, but getting that working with Reason was a WIP; and then there's syntax extensions... And docs are in the OCaml syntax, except the BS ecosystem, which is conveniently bilingual
Free online course that teaches statically-typed functional programming using SML as a teaching language. Lecture videos are short and to the point. Prof. Dan Grossman is widely recognized as a great lecturer and he gets the ideas across really well.
From there learn OCaml, which is the ML with the widest industry adoption.
Honestly the book Purely Functional Data Structures opened my eyes to the different approach functional languages supply. The concept of pattern matching is so pervasive in ML and I would say that in tandem with creating data structures using types is the central idea of ML that you put to use when using it.
