Someone (I think John C. Peterson) mentioned this paper at the Paul Hudak memorial symposium last year. His comment was the that the comparison was unfair, because the Haskell program was written by Mark P. Jones, who was a good enough programmer to outshine his competitors no matter what language. :)
The second Haskell program in this paper, that also out compete everyone, was built in a week by a grad student that did not knew Haskell before hand without talking to the first implementer.
