[sausagefeet]

In my experience Futures, Deferreds, and Promises all have different definitions. JS developers seem to be cooping some of these meanings for their own usage, which is natural in any fast growing community. All of the Promise APIs I've seen in JS are really just what I historically saw called Deferreds (like this jQuery API). Futures and Promises, historically, have been ways to express asynchronous work in a synchronous workflow, where a Future is just a read-only view of a Promise. If interested, play with Mozart/Oz and grab a copy of Concepts Techniques and Models of Computer Programming. I both very mind expanding when it comes to thinking of concurrency and data flow.