In system administration, the languages of choice for solving automation tasks are
scripting languages, owing to their flexibility, extensive library support and
quick development cycle. Functional programming is more likely to be found in
software development teams and the academic world. This separation means that
system administrators cannot use the most effective tool for a given problem; in an
ideal world, we should be able to mix and match different languages, based on the
problem at hand. This experience report details our initial introduction and use of
Haskell in a mature, medium size project implemented in Python. We also analyse the
interaction between the two languages, and show how Haskell has excelled at solving
a particular type of real-world problems.