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Thank you to Microsoft and Anders Hejlsberg for inventing Async/Await (and to F# for the original inspiration) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises

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async/await as we know it actually came from Midori's C# dialect, which indeed was inspired from F#: http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/19/asynchronous-everything/

(Although, just to be pedantic, the concept of futures is way older than F#. Alice's syntax, for example, is pretty close)

The nice part about F#'s async implementation is that it was purely a library. I wish languages aimed at allowing developers to build things for the language, rather than providing more compiler built-ins. Making it extensible is more elegant (though I understand it might be easier to optimize perf).

Integrated features are easier to tool and provide good diagnostics for. It's nice to have enough expressiveness to model monadic computations without too much syntactic overhead - and monads are usually enough, since they hand blobs of user code to the library to be composed as necessary - but debugging a reshuffled graph of closures is no picnic.

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