> When I see an (admittedly admirably concise) Haskell program get ten times longer just to approach the speed of the most obvious expression in C++ or even C, it leaves me uninspired.

Well, if the most obvious expression in C++ or C was a hundred times longer then that's still a win for Haskell. Particularly when the performance-critical parts are usually a tiny fraction of any given program. Frankly I don't think the industry should even start worrying about performance yet though, given how much difficulty we still have with producing correct software.