Some notes to remind future me why Promises are pretty neat.

What do they give me?

• They let you regain error handling for asynchronous operations.
• They let you avoid nested callbacks (and the pyramid indentation that comes with them).

Can I use them?

They were initially formalised in the Promises/A+ specification, and have been officially adopted in to JavaScript with ES6.

They’ve been supported in all major browsers (except IE) for a while now. A polyfill exists for browsers that do not support them.

Any important details?

• Promises can start executing the instant they have been instantiated. However, this does not strictly mean that they will be.
• If you call .then(success_function, failure_function) on a Promise, the appropriate function will not be called until a Promise has settled — either fulfilled or rejected.
• Calling .catch() is equivalent to calling .then(null, function).

I need help visualising them

Try Promisees — it’ll visualise and animate the promise-y code you give it. You can also slow down the animation and record animated GIFs!