[jmillikin]

  > And it's targeted in an entirely different domain -- systems programming.
  > Haskell is a garbage collected pure functional programming language.

At the time there were many people trying to make a go of doing systems programming in Haskell. I remember lots of arguments about libraries using ByteString/Text vs String in their public APIs, where the research people were like "linked list of u32 is so conceptually pure!" and the systems people were like "what, no".

You can see the Haskell influence in Rust today, for example the popular benchmarking library <https://crates.io/crates/criterion> is directly inspired by <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/criterion>. I've seen a lot of the same names in the Git logs and chat rooms.

In retrospect, starting with a low-level systems language and adding safety turned out to be a better idea than using `ST a` to implement borrow-checking in a high-level GC'd hosted language. I can only say "it seemed like a good idea at the time...".