Lambda the Ultimate

I do system programming. By this, I mean that I use quite a bit of various Posix/Unix APIs and (incidently) lots of TCP/UDP networking stuff on a daily basis to build long running apps that must be very, very solid, scalable and robust. I don't hear a lot about doing this type of programming using FPs and HOPLs. Actually, I don't think that I've heard of much serious system programming work outside of Erlang and (ocassionaly) O'Caml.

I've been using Standard ML (w/ Concurrent ML) these days and have fell in love (or at least a well regarded like) with The Standard ML Basis Library.

Alas, Standard ML doesn't seem to have generated much interest outside of academia. This is a shame, since the Basis covers a lot of practical system stuff.

What are the other higher order languages well suited for system programming? (And, no fair if you have to drop down to C/C++ for Posix, binary data manipulation or networking stuff.)

... Java also acted as a brake especially to academic language design research... The goal of this second edition of the workshop was to address object-oriented languages that diverge from Java’s doctrine but support a much more dynamic way of constructing software. In the near future, this dynamicity will be required in order to construct software that is highly context-dependent due to the mobility of both the software itself and its users...

ECOOP 2004 Workshop - Back to Dynamicity

ECOOP 2003 Workshop