2009/03/20 Mark Spezzano :

Question: Does the iMac have good support for Haskell development?

Yes. I generally use the Mac binary of GHC and then install C libs with MacPorts.

Question: What environment setups do people commonly use (e.g. Eclipse Xcode etc)?

I use screen and vim. In particular, I use MacVim, which provides both a vim console application and a Mac native GUI.

Question: Are there any caveats I should be aware of before changing systems (i.e. unpleasant surprises).

Mac laptops get very warm. You'll have a powerful urge to buy an iPhone and pimp Macs to your friends. There is really no 'home' or 'end' key. To move back and forth on a line in the Terminal application, use fn-shift-leftarrow and fn-shift-rightarrow (annoyed me for days). To move back and forth on a line in grapical application -- for example, the search bar in Firefox -- use cmd-leftarrow and cmd-rightarrow. MacPorts is not as robust as comparable systems on other operating systems: Gentoo's Portage and FreeBSD's Ports. It corrupts its registry and terrible things happen. The remedy is usually a total reinstall of all packages. This has happened to me only once on one Mac in a year and a half of administering several Macs; but it's not something I've ever dealt with on other source-based systems. -- Jason Dusek