They're supposed to make things nicer. Syntactic sugar. Personally, I don't really see them helping in most cases. They have just as much code and generally

They're supposed to make things nicer. Syntactic sugar. Personally, I don't really see them helping in most cases. They have just as much code and generally rearrange it into a form that I find less readable. For his first example, he provides the callback function (which is actually empty, but whatever) but the promise version doesn't show the function. If it did, it'd be just as verbose and hard to read, if not moreso. Now, that changes a bit with the .then syntax later. With callbacks, you'd end up with a series of nested callbacks, which can get just as ugly as a series of nested if statements. The .then syntax lets you chain it all together in a more visually pleasing way, and I think it's easier to read, too. In short, the way promises are often done is wrong (and he's saying so) and there's a proper way to do it. Unfortunately, a lot of frameworks are missing that feature, and so they're just screwed up.