It is surprising because pure functional languages have not been around for a long time, especially not ones with good optimizers. > Do you really think that "

It is surprising because pure functional languages have not been around for a long time, especially not ones with good optimizers. > Do you really think that "do something before it is strictly needed in a lazy language" is new? That's not what the "par" combinator does. "par" along with "pseq" is already used, today, to achieve parallelism in Haskell code, and it already is easier to parallelize than in other environments. Additionally, STM in Haskell is usable in practice, unlike other implementations of software transactional memory, and it also relates to purity (in this case, the ability to distinguish different types of impurity).