MapReduce slides from Google
Google has published a series of tutorial presentations about MapReduce, the GFS, and distributed algorithms. I love this kind of stuff: the fruitful interaction of my two passions, programming languages and distributed computing.
The presentation shows functional programming in a good light; I have one quibble so far: The 3rd slide of the 2nd talk ("MapReduce Theory and Implementation") says, "Functional operations do not modify data structures: They always create new ones." And then, "Original data still exists in unmodified form." But this is an implementation detail; the compiler needn't keep the original data if it it's not going to be used.
More helpful would be to note that, in a functional language, a variable's value never changes, thus making it easy to read the code. Whether input data stays around after an operation is a different issue, and one the compiler can easily handle better than humans, on average.