My claim that Standard Chartered thinks "strict haskell is a lot easier to deal with" comes from this comment from Lennart.
> If my only concern was semantics (i.e., input-output behavior) then I'd prefer call-by-name semantics, because I think it behaves more compositionally. But for practical concerns like resource consumption, debugging, stack trace, etc then strict evaluation is better.
Overall though, you're right that my initial claims against strictness may have been a bit too harsh. If I could edit my initial comment, I would write something more like
> 2. Laziness is often hard to use in practice. As Standard Chartered, a company that uses a strict variant of Haskell, notes: space leaks, difficulty of debugging, and hard to decipher stack traces are downsides to laziness.
In my opinion, laziness definitely does have nicer semantics than strictness. It's more expressive and easier to compose. In practice though, I prefer strict languages mostly for the reasons Standard Chartered mentions.
> If my only concern was semantics (i.e., input-output behavior) then I'd prefer call-by-name semantics, because I think it behaves more compositionally. But for practical concerns like resource consumption, debugging, stack trace, etc then strict evaluation is better.
Overall though, you're right that my initial claims against strictness may have been a bit too harsh. If I could edit my initial comment, I would write something more like
> 2. Laziness is often hard to use in practice. As Standard Chartered, a company that uses a strict variant of Haskell, notes: space leaks, difficulty of debugging, and hard to decipher stack traces are downsides to laziness.
In my opinion, laziness definitely does have nicer semantics than strictness. It's more expressive and easier to compose. In practice though, I prefer strict languages mostly for the reasons Standard Chartered mentions.