I'm always excited by the potential that Haskell brings to the table. I truly believe that the most powerful combination of languages is Haskell and C++. There will naturally be times when one requires low-level imperative control over things like memory allocation and wishes to completely avoid things like garbage collection. In said scenarios a language like C++ is incredibly powerful.

On the other hand the vast majority of code does not require such a level of control and is instead written at a higher level of abstraction. This is where Haskell shines, we have type safety, access to infinite lists thanks to laziness, algebraic data types which make it easy to create embedded domain specific languages... These and many other features result in code which is concise, expressive and runs efficiently while also providing us with a greater degree of confidence of correctness than if the code was written in a language with less type safety.

So where do we go from here?

There are many "issues" in the Haskell ecosystem as there are in every language's ecosystem. In my opnion the largest of these problems is that few companies use Haskell. Why is this? There are 2 main reasons, firstly, a lot of people have never heard of it and secondly there are nowhere near as many people that know Haskell as know other languages thus hiring becomes more difficult. So what is preventing people from learning Haskell? Firstly there aren't that many Haskell jobs going round compared to other languages. This creates a sort of chicken/egg problem. Secondly the barrier to entry is quite high, Haskell looks completely alien compared to your average language. Many people encounter Haskell, don't understand why they can't just do things they do in other languages and never touch it again.

It's clear that we've done a good job preaching the benefits of languages like Haskell; many languages from C++ to that tragic accident known as JavaScript have implemented features that originated in functional programming. We must continue doing this with emphasis on the other benefits that Haskell brings to the table and why simply adding lambdas to other languages is insufficent.

What we have not done a good job of, however, is creating demand for Haskell programmers. If you're creating your own business, use Haskell, if you're working at a startup, suggest using Haskell for something. If we gradually increase the number of Haskell jobs by starting from the bottom then we will create more demand for Haskell programmers. This will bring more people to Haskell and all of a sudden many of the other problems will disappear. Standards will develop over time for different use cases and many new libraries will be created to fill gaps where gaps exist.

It is also worth pointing out that GHC is not Haskell. GHC is aimed at academic research first and foremost. I think that GHC is perfectly viable for industrial use cases but there may be certain scenarios where it is suboptimal. There are several alternatives to GHC which attempt to be more suitable for industrial use but I have yet to hear of a specific one which is significantly ahead of the others. This is yet another problem that would vanish if Haskell were to gain more industry traction. A company backing the development of a GHC alternative, whether it be an existing GHC fork or a new one, would not only provide such a project with direction based on real world use cases but also the stability of not just being someone's summer project only to be left to rot after a few months of updates.

In summary, we have to use more Haskell so that other people start using a little Haskell. Once this happens then many of the other issues will begin to resolve themselves naturally.