In Minnow there is no shared state. The finished language will allow you to chose between a scope-enforced pass-by-handoff, or simply by copying what you wish to send.

Monads, too, have a problem in that they aren’t concurrent. By definition they define a string of things that must be done in order.

Instead, what is more helpful is to talk about the system as connected autonomous actors, so that you can use analysis to see how best to lay these actors on the hardware (you can see my Minnow talk for a light introduction, or dive into the StreamIT papers for more information)

The finished Minnow will allow higher order automation.

Aside from treating actors like sort-of monads, does Minnow actually support higher-order constructs? If it does, then I suppose it would be possible to avoid mutable state for the most part, it would just take a bit of self-control.