Yes, the next Haskell will be strict; that's generally although not universally accepted.

I have however noticed that while much Haskell code doesn't make very fancy use of laziness, it is widely used for very local control flow. E.g. a pattern I see relatively often is `fromMaybe (error "...some message")`, which would be problematic in a strict language (because `error` would always be evaluated).

Even without partial functions, laziness can also simplify code structure when you can just 'let' bind any value that will possibly be used on any control flow path, without worrying about unnecessary computation.

These conveniences are not deal-breakers - I get by without them just fine in SML - but they do serve to make the language a bit nicer.