[the_af]

On the other hand, there's the 1994 Navy sponsored study which had as an (informal) conclusion that Haskell was better at rapid prototyping when compared to other languages of the time.

http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Haskel...

The experiment mostly compared Haskell with imperative languages such as C++ and Ada, but there was also at least one Lisp variant. There were several informal aspects to the study, not the least of which being that there were no clearly defined requirements for the system to be implemented (so it was up to each participant to define the scope), but the conclusion is very interesting nonetheless:

The Haskell took less time to develop and also resulted in less lines of code than the alternatives, and it produced a runnable prototype that some of the reviewers had a hard time believing wasn't a mockup. Many of the alternatives didn't even end up with a working system. It should also be noted that the Haskell participants decided to expand the scope of the experiment; i.e. they didn't "win" because they implemented a heavily simplified solution, but in fact added extra requirements to their system and still finished earlier!

Even though Obj-C wasn't included in the study, there were similar enough C-like languages in it, so my bet is that Haskell would have won against it as a rapid prototyping language as well.