Disclaimer: I have minimal exposure to Haskell or Haskell programmers, so this opinion is predicated upon my experience with programmers of many other languages, not Haskell in particular, so I could be completely wrong.
Lazy is a ridiculous default, the combinatorial explosion created by GHC extensions makes C compiler quirks look like a gentle massage in comparison, and building Haskell is a friggin migraine on wheels.
But for whatever reason, those folks are on average in my experience, serious as a heart attack.
What's more Haskell specific is recognizing many problems can be solved easier when seen through the lens of parsers, interpreters and/or compilers.
Haskell's and the whole ML family of languages are great at writing parsers etc. In fact they were originally invented for implementing other languages.
I meant that solving a problem in Haskell can often mean eg writing something a bit like a parser.
For a new language I would suggest that without annotation, only pure, total functions are allowed.
Haskell makes you annotate side-effecting functions with a tag (like IO). But it allows divergent and partial functions just fine. That's why they can't just remove the laziness.
I propose that the latter would also need a tag.
The nice thing about total functions is that the choice between evaluation orders becomes purely a matter of optimization, and won't change anything about semantics.
Some languages like Agda already do something a bit like this.
(Also note that total functions are not Turing complete. But that's a feature, not a bug.)
Eh, I'm fairly sure the top 10% of people who liked the bad old PHP were still fairly moronic. (Facebook gave PHP a nice revamp, so it's a much nicer language these days.)
For another example, have a look at newLISP. Especially http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html
However, I agree with your point on average in general for most languages.
That's not really the issue though. I said top 10% by some measure of quality. Whether not the top 10% of PHP programmers liked the language is a separate variable from their levels of competence & intelligence as compared to some other language.
Yes, there were some smart people forced to use it. But they were perhaps enough to drive up the top 2%, not so much the top 10%.