The reason I want to be able to read JavaScript code written by others, no matter what oddball syntax they want to use, is because I want to be able to leverage the huge selection of web development libraries available freely on the internet. I started learning software development in a very commercialized world where everything costs money. Frameworks, components, technical support, sometimes even documentation costs money. But in today’s open-source world, the biggest cost is the time spent getting up to speed. I want to have the skill to get up to speed quickly, but I’m definitely not there yet.

The latest motivation is a nifty looking web app framework under development called Arwes. (Heard through Hackaday.) Arwes aims to make it easy to build computer interfaces that resemble fictional interfaces we see in science-fiction movies. This is, of course, much easier said than done. What shows up onscreen in a movie typically only needed to serve the purpose of a single scene. Which means a single interaction path, with a single set of data, towards a single goal. It could easily be a PowerPoint slide deck (and sometimes that’s exactly what they are on set.)

Real user interfaces have to handle a wide range of interactions, with a wide range of data, and serving multiple possible tasks. Not to mention having to worry about things never seen onscreen like internationalization and accessibility. Trying to make Sci-Fi onscreen interfaces work in a real world capacity usually ends up as a painful exercise. I’ve seen many efforts to create UI resembling Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s LCARS interface and it always ends up as something that delivers a poor user experience and inefficient use of screen real estate. And there’s the fact copyright around LCARS prevents a free open-source web framework.

I’m confident Arwes will evolve to tackle these and other similar issues. Reading the current state of documentation, I see there exists a set of “Vanilla” controls for use in any web framework of choice, and a sample implementation of such integration with React.js framework. At the moment I don’t know enough to leverage the Vanilla controls directly, and I have yet to learn React. I have more learning ahead of me before I could look at a framework like Arwes and say: “Oh yeah, I know how to use that.” That is still my goal and I’ll get there one small step at a time.