Haskell allows to build abstractions that are less leaky than in most other languages. Take a vector package, for example. It provides you with unboxed vectors

Haskell allows to build abstractions that are less leaky than in most other languages. Take a vector package, for example. It provides you with unboxed vectors that are structure-of-arrays by default with the interface of array-of-structures. That means you can have fast slicing operations in both dimensions - slice by field and/or by indices. Of course you can have unboxed array-of-structure arrays, if you need them, they are there too. But their use is transparent to you as user, however your choice is. Same is for other interesting structures. Say you wrote your parsing library. You can provide a rule to compiler such that code "(pchar c `pthen` p1) <|> (pchar c `pthen` p2)" is equivalent to "pchar c `pthen` (p1 <|> p2)" and you get left factorization for all your grammars supported by compiler. Parallelization is often as far away as adding a par/pseq annotation. Haskell can remove intermediate lists and fuse mapping over complex structures such as red-black trees - it is done for all of your code so when you do "fmap f (fmap g) rbTree" you will get "fmap (f . g) rbTree" and compiler will try to get you that code by transforming your code where "fmap f" can be pretty far away from "fmap g rbTree". The pattern matching checks are awesome - compiler will warn you if you wrote more general check before more specific one. The absence of this in C++ made my life a little bit more interesting than is comfortable for me. In short, most of the time you can write code however you want or need and compiler will support you. As if you are "team programming" with a bunch of smart people - the compiler's authors.