[chrisfinazzo]

Disclaimer: Not a programmer - I do not have a CS degree. One of my minors as an undergrad was MIS and while I took a database programming course as a senior, my knowledge is limited.

The high-level explanation I recall reading years ago somewhere (Joel on Software, I think??) was that a) Functional programs have no side effects, leading to the notion that b) They can, without much effort, be adapted for parallel tasks.

The example here was MapReduce, which was the original guts of the Google Search algorithm.

E.g, Things are fast because we can send your query to many, many computers to find an answer, and chances are good that that machine is (relatively) close to you, which means low wait times to get your answer.