I think this is a bit of an unfair accusation ("simple-minded").  Performance is only relevant to certain domains, sure.  But program performance is an entire *industry*.  And I'd argue it's of massive importance to the world at large.  Intel has an army of "AE"s (application engineers) that go out to other companies to make applications perform better.  There are plenty of compute bound industries -- i.e. movie companies are limited by what kind of frame they can render in ~24 hrs; sequencing centers are limited by certain very slow bioinformatics algorithms; you can look almost anywhere you like for examples.

As a community I think we have to face the fact that writing the hot inner loop of your application as idiomatic Haskell is not [yet] going to give you C/Fortran performance off the bat.  Though in some cases there's not really anything stopping us but more backend/codegen work (I'm thinking of arithmetically intensive loops with scalars only).  For example, the following Mandel kernel is in many ways the *same* as the C version:

We have the types; we've got strictness (for this loop); but the C version was 6X faster when I tested it.

  -Ryan