So there are no such libraries, and you are just wishing that they existed and that they took over the meaning of `then` from promises? ________________________________________ From: Claus Reinke [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 10:11 To: Domenic Denicola; Mark Miller; David Bruant Cc: Mark S. Miller; es-discuss Subject: Re: A Challenge Problem for Promise Designers (was: Re: Futures)
> Can you point to any code in wide use that makes use of this > "thenables = monads" idea you seem to be implicitly assuming? > Perhaps some of this "generic thenable library code"? I have never > seen such code, whereas the use of "thenable" to mean "object with > a then method, which we will try to treat as a promise" as in > Promises/A+ seems widely deployed throughout libraries that are > used by thousands of people judging by GitHub stars alone. > > Thus I would say it's not promise libraries that are "harming the > thenable operations," but perhaps some minority libraries who > have misinterpreted what it means to be a thenable. Instead of rehashing the arguments from the various issue tracker threads, where examples have been presented even in the half (or less) I've read so far, let me try a different track: consider the case of Roman vs Arabic numerals. As a user of Roman numerals, you might point to centuries of real world use in the great Roman empire, complain that Arabic numerals don't have explicit numbers for things like IX or LM etc, ask why anyone would need an explicit symbol representing nothing at all, or ask for examples of real world use of Arabic numerals in Roman markets, or say that Roman numerals don't need to follow the same rules as Arabic numerals, and that instead users of Arabic numerals have misinterpreted what it means to work with numbers. All those arguments are beside the point, though. The point is that Arabic numerals (with 0) are slightly better than Roman numerals at representing the structure behind the things they represent, making it slightly easier to work with those things. And that is why Arabic numerals have won and Roman numerals are obsolete, after centuries of real-world use in a great empire. Thenables in the JS-monadic sense represent common structure behind a variety of data types and computations, including Promises, they represent that structure well, and they give JS an equivalent to vastly successful computational structures in other languages. And that isn't because I or someone famous says so, but because lots of people have worked hard for lots of years to figure out what those common structures are and how they might be represented in programming languages, refining the ideas against practice until we have reached a state where the only question is how and when to translate those ideas to another language, in this case JS. Promises differ from other thenables, but there is no reason to burden the common interface with those differences. Claus _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
