Type-inference doesn't provide anything related to parallel maps, though Haskell's type system can verify that they're safe. Switching an arbitrary loop to a pa

Type-inference doesn't provide anything related to parallel maps, though Haskell's type system can verify that they're safe. Switching an arbitrary loop to a parallel one in C#, Scala, Java, whatever, is certainly a crapshoot. The real benefit to purity and laziness (imo) is the STM. The type system (and pure functions) allow rerunning transactions arbitrarily without worry about side effects, and laziness by default minimizes lock contention by deferring most code execution outside of the transaction block. Joe Duffy has a pretty good writeup a few years ago outlining the difficulty of writing an STM for languages without such guarantees, it's definitely worth a read: http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/01/03/ABriefRetrospectiveOnTransactionalMemory.aspx http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/01/03/ABriefRetros...