To make this discussion more concrete, here are some problems I've thus far found on the Mac:

- GHC ships with the wrong compiler path for (some version s of?) OS X, causing various C-related stuff to fail. https://gist.github.com/cartazio/7131371

- ghc-pkg gets itself into an error state pretty quickly after installing a fresh Haskell Platform, and ghc-pkg recache must be run.

- You must manually request the latest version of cabal-install. cabal install cabal-install by default gives you a version without sandboxes.

These are just a few of the issues that come to mind; I've run into quite a few more in my Haskell explorations. You can imagine how this state of affairs would cause a lot of developers to give up. I'm not at all blaming anyone in the truly wonderful Haskell community. Everything about Haskell is done volunteers, and I'm grateful for their work. I'm just offering a theory as to why Haskell hasn't been embraced as warmly as, say, Node or Go.