Unnecessary hyperbole aside, I think you're confusing two conflicting goals. One is to provide code examples in order to explain a particular concept to an audience not already familiar with that concept, by building upon examples previously explained in the article. Another is to explain how to write production code using existing promises frameworks.
For the purposes of explanation, I used a similar code flow as the standard callback example previously described, except that I included the chaining of error handling with parallels to synchronous try/catch/finally flows.
The promises excerpt you've derided is an example of what promises bring to the table over straight callbacks for simplifying complex chains of asynchronous operations, not an example of how to use promises in production code.
Additionally, this is an article about framework design, not how to use them, making your corrections (which involve using a framework with chainable proxy queues) somewhat tangental to the discussion.
> var users = connection.call('collection', 'users');
You seem to have the generic concept of a promise confused with a particular promises implementation with some extensions that you particularly like.
Not all promises libraries support `call`, and many don't support the return of the expected proxy interface from another proxy interface, which is the very technique described in the article.
The Promises/A[0] specification barely touches upon the subject and specifies that call "returns a promise to provide the return value of the requested function call," not a chainable proxy to the expected return interface. Even the Promises/A+[1] spec seems to ignore the subject of `call` entirely.
> it's hard to take a criticism on a model seriously where the OP doesn't understand the model.
This isn't a criticism of the model, it's an explanation of the model and some suggested extensions.
Considering I clearly stated both in the intro and the conclusion, "This approach builds on promises and standard callbacks" and, "The great thing about this technique is that it can compose really well with existing promise frameworks," I'm really curious as to how you managed to miss that point.
To demonstrate, here's a simple diff of your "correct" example enhanced using my proposed technique:
https://gist.github.com/Yuffster/4ca84f31cfaef33c4138/revisi...
I think we can both agree that, to a developer not possessing your level of skill, the revised example is slightly easier to follow.
> It's awesome that it's a post by someone who just attended the recourse [sic] center and they're a new programmer and already struggling with these interesting issues and trying to solve them
Thank you very much for the encouraging words, but in the future, could you do everyone a favor and either read an author's biography or click on the author link before making wild assumptions about his or her programming background?
The context might make it easier for you to understand the article itself, making your comments far more valuable.
---