Why do you think ml is on the worse side of the principle when compared to java?
Sml is a superpolished language, very well-defined formally, being a culmination of years of design effort and uniting a family of academia-born languages. It took 40 years of research to release the final version in 1997.
Java is on the industry side of thing: semi-formalized, numerous omissions when created, a bunch of ad hoc ideas, released in 1995. Not sure it took more than 3-4 years to get the first official version out.
"Worse is better" is an extremely misleading phrase. It's supposed to be ironic, not sarcastic. Unfortunately, the authors of "Unix Haters Handbook" exercised terrible judgement used it as a sarcastic pejorative. Now nobody understands what anybody is actually saying when they use it. I mean it in the original sense, where it's basically another way to express "Less is more."
SML is borderline minimalist, it's "worse" because it doesn't try to solve everybody's problems with a bunch of ad hoc language features and a stdlib and formalization larger than the entire legal code of the United States. It's "worse" because it comes with "less". You can't just import solution and start writing AbstractFactoryManager2 garbage. It's not actually worse to anybody but beancounters.
Sml is a superpolished language, very well-defined formally, being a culmination of years of design effort and uniting a family of academia-born languages. It took 40 years of research to release the final version in 1997.
Java is on the industry side of thing: semi-formalized, numerous omissions when created, a bunch of ad hoc ideas, released in 1995. Not sure it took more than 3-4 years to get the first official version out.