stevelihn:
I have not used Haskell to write large scale program, but I am certainly interested to know the answer to these questions.
Can Haskell offer the following as Pythoner boasts? 1. can be used for many kinds of software development. (some may argue yes, but different kinds from what python is good for.) 2. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools (FFI? Is the support strong?) 3. comes with extensive standard libraries (this is a yes, and is getting better every day) 4. and can be learned in a few days (very unlikely, maybe a few months to a year)
These are vague conditions we can easily address: 1. General purpose languages -- we write OS kernels and web sites in Haskell -- you can clearly use it for anything in between as well. 2. The FFI in Haskell is perhaps the most powerful out there. You can import C or export Haskell to C with a single line FFI decl. 3. Libs are in a good state, as you've seen. 4. You can't learn the entire Python language in a few days if all you've done is Prolog. So it should be qualified with "if you know Perl or Ruby" Toss in fast native code, debuggers and profilers, built for robustness, along with powerful concurrency and parallelism, and you've got some marketing hype for Haskell :) -- Don