Lambda the Ultimate

I thought this paper may be of some interest to LtU readers. By Curt J. Sampson, Starling Software:

I describe the initial attempt of experienced business software developers with minimal functional programming background to write a non-trivial, business-critical application entirely in Haskell. Some parts of the application domain are well suited to a mathematically-oriented language; others are more typically done in languages such as C++.

I discuss the advantages and difficulties of Haskell in these circumstances, with a particular focus on issues that commercial developers find important but that may receive less attention from the academic community.

I conclude that, while academic implementations of "advanced" programming languages arguably may lag somewhat behind implementations of commercial languages in certain ways important to businesses, this appears relatively easy to fix, and that the other advantages that they offer make them a good, albeit long-term, investment for companies where effective IT implementation can offer a crucial advantage to success.

Paper available here, slides from ICFP talk available here.

The "disadvantages" section seems interesting, as many of the disadvantages of Haskell as a commercially viable language (in Sampson's opinion) seem to stem from lack of decent tool support. However, a quick browse seems to confirm that many efforts are being made to address this (e.g. Hare, a Haskell refactorer, HLint, a lint equivalent, etc. etc.)

Are there any more examples of papers, discussing the pros and cons of functional languages in a commercial setting, like this one?

EDIT: fixed broken link to paper.