[zmmmmm]

> The point is promises free you from wanting or > needing to know about the order that things happen in > ... But the truth is once you embrace them, > that need becomes unimportant

This smells like the classic leaky abstraction though. Like when people tried to paper over the difference between remote calls and local calls with abstract interfaces (CORBA, RMI, etc.). Everyone would say it was so awesome, remote calls look the same as local calls! But it wasn't awesome, it was horrible, because the details of the abstraction 'leaked' through and you got all kinds of problems from having delegated away what was actually one of the most critical, sensitive parts of your code to a layer you had no control over. 15 years later we're back to nearly everybody using REST because it turns out to be way better not to shove those abstractions on top of your most important code.

Now, I'm not saying that analogy is perfect here ... but it does remind me of it. Why should you care about the order of things? Just to suggest something, sometimes it's just useful to be able to reason about it. "We know the first operation definitely happened before the others, so an earlier one failing can't be a side effect of something a later one did ... oops, we don't know that any more. We actually have no idea what order they happened in."

[Derander]

The need for that form of reasoning seems to me to be a symptom of the way that we go about writing code. We don't need to worry about if line 10 executes before line 11 within a given scope -- we just know this. If we come up with a similarly simple way of writing asynchronous operations that have dependencies then we can read it just as fluently.

In my experience, promises do fill this role if they're used in a suitable scenario.