Man, I have been looking forward to writing this newsletter since day one. Today you're gonna get your first looks at the JavaScript for Everyone look and feel, and folks, it is gonna be rad as hell. You can read about all the details over at Piccalilli; I could not be more psyched that they're working on this stuff out-loud.
I used "rad" deliberately back there — I’ve been squarely in my “retro-future aesthetic” era for a while now, no doubt evolved naturally out of my avid Grindhouse movie consumption. If there's one thing I like, it's an 90s film's depiction of the distant year 20XX that’s mostly centered around contemporary 90s clothing but, like, shiny. If there are two things I like, it's that first thing, and also that first thing with a boom mic clearly visible in the shot.
I'm not being ironic; I love the hell out of a boom mic, the same way I love a miniature where you can see the glue lines, or how the futuristic space cyborg's vision failing involves television static, or LED matrix numbers and letters on a digital screen, or that the cars of the future all turn out to be the cars of the 90s with shapes welded onto them. I like texture.
That’s why my primary ask for the look-and-feel of JavaScript for Everyone was "anything but that 'Apple store with all the lights turned off' look." You probably know it: any background color you want as long as its black — a wide range of foreground and accent colors as long as they're blue-to-violet and yellow, respectively. Anodyne, cold, sterile, calculated in a laboratory to have a broad and largely ignorable appeal. No grit; no friction.
That's not JavaScript, for my money — people made JavaScript. JavaScript has grit, friction, texture, and I wanted a look with some dust and scratches to match. I wanted that one scene from Escape from New York (1981).
You've seen Escape from New York, yeah? I only just watched it for the first time last year. It's great.
There's this scene where Snake Plissken — a normal and reasonable name for a person to have — is piloting a glider into post-apocalyptic New York. For a sum total of fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, the camera focuses on three tiny CRT screens inside the glider. On them is a glowing green 3D wireframe of the surrounding buildings, from three angles. It doesn't make any sense. They probably weigh thirty pounds each, and you're in a glider, where presumably that matters! Just look out the window, Snake.
This wireframe effect looks, in no uncertain terms, rad as hell. Moreso than it had any right to, given that it was just some grainy green wireframes on tiny screens; rad enough that it stuck with me. I went and looked it up afterwards, based entirely on that "there was… something about that" hunch. It turned out that it was accomplished by making the whole of New York out of blocks of white acrylic, painting all but the seams black, and filming fly-throughs under a blacklight. All practical effects. It must've taken ages, all for what would otherwise be a few ignorable seconds of an imagined future.
Every day we’re building the modern web on a foundation made from a vision for the web’s future formed out of the constraints of the mid-90s. The vague notion of Java-like syntax circa 1995 but, like, shiny. Boom mic squarely in the shot every time we open an IDE. It might not always work perfectly, but man, it does work.
We’re gonna get into JavaScript’s messy details — all the good and bad design decisions, all the lucky guesses and total whiffs at what the future of the web might look like. I don’t want to gloss over that either figuratively or skeuomorphically. That’s the good stuff; that’s the charm. That’s the stuff that sticks with you.