Haskell has an elegance, and can be written as simply as C. Usually fast enough, and can be optimized as well. The downside is that you will be sucked into a rabbit hole of academic type theory and wonder how best to express your system as a Free Monad instead of bashing it out like any sane C programmer. Just kidding, someone already figured out those hard parts for you, you just forgot to browse for it on Hackage.
It's a fair criticism of Haskell that you can fairly easily blow up your time/space complexity without realising it though. I think in many ways it's better but Haskell specifically demands a lot even for a functional language.
