Gordon Weakliem describes the problem he was looking to solve in Python:

What I wanted was a parallelization of the effort in a way that was syntactically clean. Ideally, I'd issue a bunch of calls and then come back to collect and the results at some future point. This kind of thing is sometimes described as a future (or sometimes, a "promise").

In the post, he shows how he solved the problem. As it happens, I needed something like this in my blog server a long time ago, and stumbled on class Promise in the system. As it happens, if you Google "Smalltalk Promise", this screencast is the first result. It's a useful class to have in your pocket.

Technorati Tags: promise, futures