"I find that sometimes real-world analogies work well for explaining / remembering concepts. Here's one - it's not perfect but it helps me." "Think that you are at one of those modern sushi restaurants where you have a belt going around the room with sushi boats on it. You just sit down and wait till one goes by, grab it and eat. But they also allow you to order carry out." — Nitya Narasimhan, 2018/06/17
"A Future represents a computation that doesn’t complete immediately. Where a normal function returns the result, an asynchronous function returns a Future, which will eventually contain the result. The future will tell you when the result is ready." — Dart documentation