I don't feel discouraged about Haskell at all. On the contrary, I welcome having a darned good excuse to learn and play with Haskell because I agree with The Pragmatic Programmers that doing so will make me a better, more well rounded programmer.

One of the more positive and impressive aspects of the Pugs project is the interplay and learning from each other (ok, and teasing ;-) that goes on constantly at the IRC Channel between the Perl hackers and the Haskell lambda folk. As if to emphasize this duality, autrijus usually signs on with greetings lambdacamels!. A real sense of camaraderie has emerged that I think can only benefit both the Perl and Haskell communities.

This flurry of Haskell activity may have had some impact on the Perl 6 design team (I heard Larry was playing around with it) -- which can't be a bad thing, given Perl's long history of borrowing good ideas from other languages.