I didn't carry out a scientific study -- to my knowledge, no one is bringing any hard facts to the table when they talk about programming language preferences -- so you can't evaluate what I said as logically true or false.

For reference, I have used OCaml, Haskell, Golang and C extensively. I think Golang is a wasted opportunity to replace C. It's a mediocre language with a bunch of annoyances.

What kind of compiler are you writing? For which language and target?

Indeed, ML was more advanced at the time of release, and has been improved since. However I won't blame C, since C was much more successful and (as Javascript knows well) it's very much harder to make changes to a language when you have to maintain backwards compatibility with a vast body of code used in production.