Reading on wikipedia, it sounds like the 1980s this stuff came out, with support in a particular lisp released in 1980. The promise pipelining technique (using

Reading on wikipedia, it sounds like the 1980s this stuff came out, with support in a particular lisp released in 1980. The promise pipelining technique (using futures to overcome latency) was invented by Barbara Liskov and Liuba Shrira in 1988. Yes B. Liskov is the L in "SOLID", if you are wondering! Happy 40th birthday promises! :-) I wouldn't be surprised if mathematicians were thinking of this before transistors were invented though. I think it takes time for things to trickle down. Maybe it takes someone from an academic background (or a curious paper reader) to be forced to use C++ or Javascript for something, but along the lines of "progress relies on unreasonable men/women" they get annoyed and write their own library so they can use the nice Lisp/Haskell/etc. feature they are used to, but often in a more limited way but better than nothing. Then from there it might get hyped to the shithouse, die, or just get used by insiders.