Write Haskell as fast as C: exploiting strictness, laziness and recursion

BTW, I moved the articles to a different host last year,<p><a href="http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/write-haskell-as-fast-as-c-exploiting-strictness-laziness-and-recursion/" rel="nofollow">http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/write-haskell-as-fas...</a><p>and the follow-on using fusion,<p><a href="http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/haskell-as-fast-as-c-working-at-a-high-altitude-for-low-level-performance/" rel="nofollow">http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/haskell-as-fast-as-c...</a>

I am happy to see UNSW powering on in the FP world. Waaay back when I went there, they tried, valiantly, to teach us grubby Engineer hacker types the virtues of purity (via miranda), of I tried to ignore it and wanted to get to the good stuff that let me flip bits on a serial port. But now I am grateful for someone at least trying to "show me the way" so early on (and over time, I think it paid off).

Ah, was posted previously: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190963" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190963</a><p>Still, an awesome analysis that traverses the code hierarchy from assembly to Haskell.

I personally only care about optimizations that enable someone who's a domain expert in <i>something else</i> to write code that performs well. If I know Haskell at an intermediate level, and I'm focusing on the equations for protein folding, or game mechanics, or rocket trajectories, will I still be able to write code that performs well? Or do I need to be a Haskell expert first?