
The Promise System (1992) - tosh
http://web.archive.org/web/20071023111712/http://www.sunless-sea.net/Transcripts/promise.html
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paroneayea
Ah, Mark Miller on promises! I am building a system (Spritely Goblins) which
is very inspired by another system largely designed by MarkM, the "E"
programming language. I'm borrowing most of the way promises work in E in
Goblins. For those that don't know, the idea of promises in Javascript largely
got ported from E, though not entirely (there are some things nicer about E's
promises than Javascript's... promise pipelining is one clear one, and the
"when" clause is much nicer than Javascript's .then() sausage-chains).

However I didn't realize that MarkM's work with promises predated E, that it
started in his work on Xanadu... that makes sense.

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rovolo
This is a good answer to a previous thread [1] in which people were discussing
promises vs threads for asynchronous computing.

[1] Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165193)

