Once you wrap your head around the Haskell way, it seems easy to get something working. IMHO that something will be minimal and pretty as well. Once i try to make things fast, it gets weird. There are people who can write very fast Haskell code, but it seems like all of those people worked on ghc. I don't have a good mental model of when, say, a thunk will get created, so i liberally sprinkle strictness annotations, and fool around with list fusion operations.

I really like Haskell. Even with all the effort i've put into it, it seems like i've barely scratched the surface if i want performance. sigh