Re: ISSUE-124: Futures / Order of parameters (was: Re: Request for JSON-LD API review)

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's also important to note that node.js started out with futures as a
>> design paradigm and moved away from that design for a number of very
>> good reasons:
>>
>> http://www.futurealoof.com/posts/broken-promises.html
>
> From what I understand, Node shipped with a crappy model of promises.
> Note that there are *at least* four distinct promise models that have
> been seriously proposed and used in the web.  Futures is based on the
> one that "won" - Promises/A+.  Note that a lot of web-based JS
> frameworks *have* adopted promises in the last several years.

Helpfully, Manu found documentation for Node's original built-in
promises: http://manu.sporny.org/tmp/node-0.1.29-api.html#_tt_events_promise_tt

All I can say is, *no wonder* they dropped their promises in favor of
a unified callback API!  This is a *terrible* implementation of the
promises idea, with basically *none* of the benefits gained by modern
good versions like Promises/A+ and DOM Futures.

So I can say pretty confidently that the fact that Node abandoned
promises is worth approximately *zero* weight in any argument
for/against adding promises.

~TJ