Is Haskell a good choice for web applications?

On that topic, anyone know of a decent mysql lib for ruby that just lets me query and iterate over the results?

The one constantly at the top of google results is at tmtm.org, but my understanding is that it's not threadsafe or particularly speedy.

I saw something called asymy made by tptacek, but my impression was that the project was abandoned... Thomas, any comment on where that stands?

(Incidentally, DataMapper in Ruby doesn't in fact implement the Data Mapper pattern, which I find irritating.)

So if you don't do mainstream OO, then you probably don't ever need ORM. SQL databases are powerful relational engines in their own right - many ORMs have to replicate a lot of that functionality into their memory based stuff (which can be good, but its more work).

I guess its all slowly fading, as I am led to believe the trend is away from relational data to distributed data, which has a different set of problems...

The complaint was that there aren't any mature libraries that go a step further, beyond feeding manually-constructed query strings to the DB connection, preventing injection vulns at the type level, etc. In an OO language this would be an object-relational mapper. I think the functional crowd is still trying to figure out what a "functional-relational mapper" is supposed to look like.