Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement
"Await" is fantastic, and having using it for JavaScript (via TameJS and then IcedCoffeeScript), it makes things a lot easier and clearer.<p>That being said, I don't think the comparison between callbacks and goto is valid.<p>"Goto" allows you to create horrible spaghetti-code programs, and getting rid of it forces you to structure your programs better.<p>"Await", fundamentally, isn't really anything more than syntactic sugar (except for exception handling, which is a good thing). "Await" doesn't change how your program is structured at all, it just changes the <i>visual</i> representation of your code -- from indentations in a non-linear order, to vertical and linear order. It's definitely a nice improvement, and makes code easier to understand (and allows for better exception handling), but it's not actually changing the way your program is fundamentally structured.<p>And finally, "await" is only applicable when a single callback gets called once at the end. If you're passing a callback that gets used repeatedly (a sorting function, for example), then normal-style callbacks are still necessary, and not harmful at all. Sometimes they can be short lambdas, sometimes they're necessarily much larger.<p>In sum: "await" is great, but there's nothing inherently harmful about callbacks, the way "goto" is. To the contrary -- callbacks are amazingly useful, and amazingly powerful in languages like JavaScript. "Await" just makes them nicer.