[kasey_junk]

I've never in my life programmed in Node. When I say futures I'm talking about the logical concurrency primitive written about by Friedman/Wise in the 70s.

Lots & lots of idiomatic go code exists in that form (anytime you wrap a select that times out in a function you have a future).

Channels, what we are really discussing here, have 2 problems: the first is in abstraction, they don't provide basic primitives that other similar structures provide, like timeouts & cancellation. The second is in implementation. As futures you have to worry about all the edge cases around nil & closed channels. As queues they are highly contended.