Remember the first time you learned JavaScript?
I'm rewatching "Transformers One" with my partner, Rebekka, when out of the blue, she drops a bombshell trivia fact about Transformers I didn't know about.
"Did you know that when the first Transformers movie came out in Theaters in the 80s, it left loads of young children crying because they killed off Optimus Prime?"
I slowly move to pause the movie.
I take a deep breath and contain myself enough to say:
"Please, tell me more".
Because even though it's a little sad to hear, what I would imagine to be four-year-olds, crying upon seeing their hero die on the big screen...
I also can't contain my dark sense of humor.
It's just, I'm sorry, sorta funny.
As she kept telling me more about the story, I kept learning more and more things that made it even funnier.
Things like:
Transformers first had two seasons of the original 80s cartoon before the movie came out.
The original series was pretty goofy. Despite the plot being about a war between Autobots and Decepticons, nobody in the series ever hurt each other. It was truly a kids' show about robots who can transform, and never took itself seriously.
Hasbro decided that it wanted to "refresh" the toy lineup. So, they released the Transformers movie right after the second season, where they predominantly featured the deaths of not only Optimus Prime, but also MANY other mainstay characters. Many of them dying from multiple shots into the chest or in their shoulders.
The tone was way stronger than the show ever was, and many kids were not ready for it (plus it was rare for a cartoon to show any deaths back then). Many many kids got choked up and cried during the film.
I too, at that age, probably would have choked up and cried.
Just like the first time I started learning JavaScript
I'll always say that I have a love-hate relationship with that language. I still hate that things like empty objects are considered truthy. But you know what? Despite its quirks, I enjoy coding with it.
And look! Unlike Optimus Prime, it doesn't have to die for it to later come back better than ever. The newest standard of ECMAScript 2025 came out!
Although I doubt you'll want to read the whole thing, here's a recap that the wonderful Dr. Axel Rauschmayer made of the new changes. I find the new iterator methods and the Promise.try chain to be the best parts.
Check it out and, if you're into reading a more... interesting story of why we call it the ECMA standards instead of the JavaScript standard, you can check out an older email I made called #FreeJavaScript here.
As always, thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend!