Andrew Coppin writes:

Maybe it's just a culture thing then... In your typical OOP language, you spend five minutes thinking "now, what collection type shall I use here?" before going on to actually write the code. In Haskell, you just go "OK, so I'll put a list here..."

Well lists are really useful, but I don't think all Haskell programmers are like you, in fact I think only the enthusiast newbies (like.. you maybe ?) only use lists without asking themselves if there is not a data structure better suited to their problem. A lot of work in the functional world goes to improve existing data structures, traversal and upgrade means and inventing new data structures to resolve real-world problems. Real Haskell programs don't limit themselves to lists, eg. if you look at xmonad you'll see that zippers play a really important role in the powerfulness of the code and it's elegance. -- Jedaï