Lambda the Ultimate

I was recently invited to be on the panel Reinventing Audio and Music Computation for Many-Core Processors at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2008), Belfast, Ireland, Aug. 2008. In my position statement, The Challenges and Opportunities of Multiple Processors: Why Multi-Core Processors are Easy and Internet is Hard, I explain why programming multi-core processors is basically a sociological problem (the technical problems were solved long ago) and why programming loosely coupled systems (like the Internet) still has a lot of technical challenges. I am curious to hear what the LtU community thinks about this.

I'm looking for example type systems that can type list structure.

For a simple example... (Sorry, I think in code)

// Map two elts at a time, not two lists
def map2(alist:List, f(*,* -> 'u) -> 'u List) // f(*,*) is not good 
  def mklis(nl: 'u List, rest: List)
    match rest
    | a :: b :: r  -> mklis(f(a,b) :: nl, r)  // types of a and b?
    | else -> reverse(nl)
  in mklis(nil, alist);

def plist2alist(plist:List -> <List>List)
  map2(plist, fn(a,b) a :: b :: nil);

plist2alist('(A, 1, B, 2, C, 3))
 => ((A,1),(B,2),(C,3))

It would be very nice to type plist's internal structure, 
thus allowing for typing the map2 function, plist2alist()'s 
resulting internal structure, etc.

I can sort of imagine some kind of regex typing construct, 
but I have no clear ideas on this.  Any languages out there 
do a good job of typing repeating internal patterned structure 
like this?

If this is impossible for any theoretical reason, I'd love 
to know that too :-)

Many thanks.

Scott