[ufo]

Not really better. The advantages of promises show up when you pass promises around, letting other people add their callbacks to it (this way the "callback structure" is implicit from the program flow, just like what happens when you do normal sync programming. Another advantage of promises is that they have some better support for error handling (you don't need to thread the error handler around and you "throw" statements are caught correctly)

Honestly, I didn't like the examples in the article very much. Not only do they fail to show the major advantages promises have, but he also uses named functions everywhere and that is quite silly.

[ianbishop]

The named functions were just an attempt at better highlighting what is going on for some readers. Not sure if it worked, but sorry it annoyed you :).

[ufo]

I personally find that creating too many functions makes the code look too different from the "natural", synchronous alternative. But I also hate when people write tons of 1-line methods (Uncle Bob style) so YMMV.