Those same arguments would apply to Python too, and it doesn't seem to have nearly as much cruft.
PHP, heavily used in production, godawful language.
Perl, heavily used in production, godawful language, but at least it's not PHP.
Python, heavily used in production, pretty good language most of the time. (It's refactoring effort is Python 3, but ended up not changing very much.)
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0441...
Haskell and I have been doing well so far in the "RealWorld" and I hope it keeps going that way :D If not, I'll probably put more time into python and C again.
(Although I should add it's a few years since I've played with Haskell. Maybe things have moved on....)
The accidential memory leaks still exist.
I prefer to emphasise the "... once you understand them" bit.
I haven't ran into memory issues yet, but I have heard others have a very hard time reasoning about memory/space leaks. However, something I hear less often is that the memory problems people have also happen in other languages.