Most of what you describe applies to haskell just as it does to everything else. It is a general purpose programming language. If you want to see what package

Most of what you describe applies to haskell just as it does to everything else. It is a general purpose programming language. If you want to see what packages are available look here: http://hackage.haskell.org/ http://hackage.haskell.org/ Yes, simple http support is in the standard library, more full featured http libs are on hackage. As for the functional programming question: I haven't found any negatives. I went from imperative programming to ocaml specifically because I thought the whole functional programming thing was just hype and wouldn't really be suitable for everything, so I wanted to be able to fall back on imperative and OO styles as needed. After a few years of never needing to fall back, I decided to take a closer look at haskell. The places haskell isn't ideal are basically the same as other high level languages. If you are doing bit twiddling or need precise control over how data is laid out in memory, you pretty much want C. I also still use shell scripts for little sysadmin stuff. Other than that I pretty much do everything in haskell now: web development, random utilities that are bigger than I want a shell script to be, network services, etc.