chalst: I have the advantage of having no desire whatsoever to preserve existing Haskell code, nor Haskell coding conventions, nor favored Haskell idioms, nor even laziness-by-default. I'm talking about a language that preserves the fundamental strengths of Haskell-like languages (which does not include their built-in Lispy data structures), adds the fundamental strengths of C++ (most particularly the destructor), and stirs in enough practicality to make the language industrially useful. To be adopted it needs to be able to use C headers as-is with no annotations, and to access structs and call functions declared there, but the syntax for doing it needn't be pretty. Heavily-used, mature C libraries would soon have convenience wrappers (and, probably, annotations), but most substantial programs use a few more-or-less obscure C libraries that don't merit wrappers or annotation. That's OK; most programs that use obscure third-party libraries call them only in a couple of places.

I'm under no illusion about the contempt in which such a language would be held in academia, but academic contempt is a very cheap price indeed for usefulness.