Re: alive e/ken style projects?

On 10/13/15 at 3:27 PM, [email protected] (Raoul Duke) wrote:

>>Javascript has promises. Can't get much more alive than Javascript. Is it still cool? :-)
>
>Well, probably mostly "no", if you ask me. :-} I realize it is
>inevitable (we do React now, don't you know), but that doesn't mean
>I'm overjoyed about it. When I can get Flow & Babel working then it is
>less bad, but still. Also, does/will it support pipelining, or other
>such advanced coolness?

Chip Morningstar wrote on the esdiscuss list:

"My sense is that many in the JS community seem to regard 
promises principally as an abstraction for dealing with 
asynchrony.  While they certainly *are* that, the original 
driving use case for their invention/adoption (when I first 
encountered them, 25 or so years ago) was as an abstraction for 
dealing with network latency, and I believe this consideration 
loomed large in the minds of some of the TC39 committee members 
who championed the adoption of the ES6 Promise API in its 
current form.  In contrast to many of the closure-based callback 
mechanisms which have been brought up variously as alternatives 
to promises or as sugarings or implementations of them, one of 
the great virtues of promises is that they can be pipelined.  In 
particular, they can be pipelined over the network when invoking 
operations on remote objects, which means that a sufficiently 
clever or aggressive implementation can speculatively deliver 
requests over the network to the result of an earlier request 
before that result has been determined, potentially short 
circuiting one and potentially many network round trips.  This 
can yield substantial (several orders of magnitude, in some 
cases) speedup to some kinds of heavily networked applications.  
This is easy to lose track of if you're just thinking of 
promises as a different notation for writing callbacks."

So I would say, yes. But the Javascript community largely hasn't 
discovered it yet. :-)

Cheers - Bill

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