[No1]

E came out in 1997. From my perspective, Scala and C++11 are the backward ducks (unless you can point to something earlier using the Scala/C++11 nomenclature).

I agree the Scala/C++11 way might make a little more sense intuitively, but it really doesn't help flipping the definitions around.

[modersky]

It's much older than that. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises

The distinction between futures and promises in the wikipedia article matches Scala's terminology exactly.

[No1]

Yes, Wikipedia's terminology exactly matches that of Scala, but that's because Wikipedia references a Scala SIP ;)

It's always bothered me that Baker and Hewitt felt the need to coin the term "future" when they were clearly aware of "promise" and "eventual". Their main distinction seems to be that a future is a 3-tuple (process, cell, queue). One can argue that their future meets the "read-only view" definition because cell is only to be written to by the same tuple's process. But they never explicitly distinguish a future as "a read-only placeholder view of a variable," and E was the first publicly-available language to make that very distinction (please correct me if I'm wrong), only they happened to use "promise" in that regard.

In any case, I trust your judgement on the matter more than my own, just wish everyone had picked a nomenclature and stuck with it.