[akg]

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" -- Alan Perlis

It's not solely just about if it is ready for commercial/real-world applications right now. The language itself is interesting and it definitely shapes a different mode of thinking.

Haskell is evolving rapidly and in interesting ways and those that are interesting in programming (as most of us here are), it's a good place to look and learn from.

[actsasbuffoon]

As an interesting side note, Microsoft just open sourced Bond. It's written in Haskell, and is a high performance, cross-language, schematized serialization tool. The project describes itself as widely used in many of Microsoft's high scalability services.

Microsoft has many proponents and detractors on HN, but no one can deny that they have plenty of services that get lots of traffic. If Haskell is serving a critical role in many of those services, then it seems that it is ready for commercial/real-world applications.

[akg]

Incidentally, there is a whole conference dedicated to commercial uses of Haskell: http://cufp.org

[tome]

Not just Haskell.