It seems to me from my experimenting with Haskell, Erlang and Scheme that functional programming languages are a fantastic way to answer scientific questions. For example, taking a small set of data and performing some extensive analysis on it to return a significant answer. It's great for working through some tough Project Euler questions or trying out the Google Code Jam in an original way.

At the same time it seems that by their very nature, they are more suited to finding analytical solutions than actually performing practical tasks. I noticed this most strongly in Haskell, where everything is evaluated lazily and your whole program boils down to one giant analytical solution for some given data that you either hard-code into the program or tack on messily through Haskell's limited IO capabilities.

Basically, the tasks I would call 'practical' such as

Aceept a request, find and process requested data,
 and return it formatted as needed

seem to translate much more directly into procedural languages. The most luck I have had finding a functional language that works like this is Factor, which I would liken to a reverse-polish-notation version of Python.

So I am just curious whether I have missed something in these languages or I am just way off the ball in how I ask this question. Does anyone have examples of functional languages that are great at performing practical tasks or practical tasks that are best performed by functional languages?