Where did futures/promises come from? They just seemed to appear out of nowhere. I'm not particularly a fan of them either. C++'s current version of std::future is particulary useless.
The promise pipelining technique (using futures to overcome latency) was invented by Barbara Liskov and Liuba Shrira in 1988.
Yes B. Liskov is the L in "SOLID", if you are wondering!
Happy 40th birthday promises! :-)
I wouldn't be surprised if mathematicians were thinking of this before transistors were invented though.
I think it takes time for things to trickle down. Maybe it takes someone from an academic background (or a curious paper reader) to be forced to use C++ or Javascript for something, but along the lines of "progress relies on unreasonable men/women" they get annoyed and write their own library so they can use the nice Lisp/Haskell/etc. feature they are used to, but often in a more limited way but better than nothing. Then from there it might get hyped to the shithouse, die, or just get used by insiders.
P.S. sorry so late answering your mail!
(I owe you mail too.)
I was terribly remiss not to mention Dojo, a popular JS toolkit which got its promises from Twisted, which of course got them from E, though Twisted modified them a bit. I don't know how it slipped my mind.
I get the impression E promises had a nicer design than JS's for handling errors -- but that's also a vague memory and I never really learned JS's.
Async/await has also mostly replaced bare Promises. The result almost gives you something as usable as threads.
Fwiw I find it amusing the async is promoted as the pinnacle of elegance in concurrent programming when in reality it exists because the JS interpreter wasn't thread safe.