

Show HN: How to market promises - mchahn

I&#x27;ve been using Node for over three years.  In the beginning I looked for callback helpers like Async and tried everything I could find.  Like many I settled into using vanilla callbacks.  It has not been a problem.<p>Back then I checked into promises and they looked promising (sorry).  The simple examples looked great.  But then I read a number of write-ups about promises and they would quickly make them appear complex and painful to learn.  Even blogs saying &quot;Promises look complicated but here&#x27;s a simple explanation&quot; would then quickly present complex explanations.<p>I&#x27;ve just started using selenium with the node driver.  This solution pretty much forced me to use promises.  In one day I now feel comfortable with them and look forward to trying them in my apps.  But this is the key point: I still don&#x27;t understand the last half of the promises tutorials and they still look complex to me.<p>I used javascript as a front-end developer successfully for years with little idea what closures and other advanced topics were and I didn&#x27;t care.  I learned the subset that worked for me and I was happy.  Actually I think this flexibility is one of the strongest features of JS.  Even with my current limited understanding of promises I am now using them effectively like I did javascript.  I&#x27;m writing lots of selenium code with promises and love it.<p>I think there should be introductory cookbooks that just tell you how to chain lines using `then` and put the error-catching `then` at the end.  The hardest part would be explaining how to get library functions to return promises.  There could be a cookbook for that also.<p>If I had a cookbook that just told me what to do and what benefits I&#x27;d get then I would have used promises years ago. I would have learned them in depth while using them, which is the only way I learn anything in depth.
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kolodny
I wrote a blog posts that actually discuses this

[http://kolodny.github.io/blog/blog/2014/04/23/future-
proof-y...](http://kolodny.github.io/blog/blog/2014/04/23/future-proof-your-
code-with-promises/)

