It's hard to tell what you mean by "low-level operations." A lot of systems programming, particularly the GNU suite, just deals with manipulating files, sockets

It's hard to tell what you mean by "low-level operations." A lot of systems programming, particularly the GNU suite, just deals with manipulating files, sockets, and so on, and Haskell can do that just fine. Example: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_Unix_tools http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_Unix_tools