Yeah I think you're coming from a pretty big write-once run anywhere perspective here. This is especially the case with CURL. Languages like Ruby would have s

Yeah I think you're coming from a pretty big write-once run anywhere perspective here. This is especially the case with CURL. Languages like Ruby would have similar issues if they didn't have the force from their communities to bolster the language. It's sort of an unfortunate truth to Haskell that it's development tools aren't so polished as something like RubyGems. That said, I've found that the time I save writing decent Haskell far surpasses the time I spend mucking with its internals, though I've been at it for 5 or so years now. Honestly, though, you're right about the Windows bit. The GHC implementation for Windows relies on tools that I personally would avoid using (MinGW) given the option of using their more mature bretheren in their native environments (LLVM/GCC/Linux/OS X). I've found that probably the best Linux distro to use Haskell with ease has been Arch Linux hands down. All in all, no, its package system is no RubyGems or what-have-you, but I think the (IMO) language makes it worth it. HN may hate me forever for saying this, but after using Haskell, I could never imagine switching to a LISP. There's too many thumbnail clippings involved, and not enough types ;-).