"I find it hard to believe that something like map/reduce or the like - or any given small-scale language feature is going to be particularly significant in ter

"I find it hard to believe that something like map/reduce or the like - or any given small-scale language feature is going to be particularly significant in terms of parallelizing any goddamn thing that's actually hard to do." I don't believe it either, but it wasn't the point of the article. It was not about magically solving hard problems, but getting about parallelism for free where it is easy. OTOH it is not apparent that those language features are actually indispensable for that. In most cases where 'map' would apply, it is quite possible for a compiler to detect that the loop body does not rely on its own previous executions and can thus be parallelized automatically.