[tikhonj]

Many people in the Haskell community like laziness. It can be a problem for performance reasons, sometimes. On the other hand, it's a boon to making the language more flexible and expressive. It helps write better, more modular code.

Laziness also makes the language more foreign and harder for many people to learn initially, but I think that fundamentally does not matter. Learning Haskell is a constant cost where the benefits are at least O(n) (and plausibly more) to how much you program with it, so any learning costs are quickly dominated as you use the language.

Unless you're trying to use Haskell to compete with C (and some people are), laziness is a net gain. Take a look at the "Why Functional Programming Matters" paper for a good case in favor of laziness.

Now, laziness does have some downsides over strict evaluation; I just believe the upsides easily outweigh them.

The reason you read about problems with laziness is because the problems are encountered before many of the benefits by people learning the language and because the problems are easier to articulate than the advantages. Also, Haskell is the only common lazy language, so that particular aspect stands out.