The "Academic" language and "Category Theory" strawmen is getting tiring...

Many of us who use Haskell do so (without an academic degree or almost any CT knowledge, by the way) because it offers the best bang for our buck -- less code, more safety, more stuff done and done well! It also runs reasonably fast, unlike similarly terse languages.

Being able to use it in a light-weight manner for one-off scripts is nice too.