# What are promises ?

- Future, promise, delay, or deferred. 
- Definition

# Historical Background

- Algol thunk
- Incremental garbage collection of Processes - 1977
- 1995 Joule channels
- 1997 Mark Miller - E

# Current state of things

- Lot of work done in Javascript
- Scala
- Finagle
- Java8
- ?

# Future Work

- ?