While there is little envy of Java in Haskell land (is there much Java envy anywhere?), there is actually a healthy flow of ideas to and from .NET, particularly

While there is little envy of Java in Haskell land (is there much Java envy anywhere?), there is actually a healthy flow of ideas to and from .NET, particularly C# and (naturally) F#. (Simon Peyton-Jones works at Microsoft Research, after all.) For example, I have heard talk of extending Haskell's already nice list comprehensions with some LINQ features like orderBy. So while the slides--which are just a backdrop for the talk rather than its entirety--may imply Haskell is insular like that, the reality is that Haskell is always happy to take features from other languages. Finally, I think the idea isn't that everybody wants to use functional programming languages, but rather that everybody should want to use functional programming languages ;).