
Weaning yourself off jQuery - bpierre
http://substack.net/weaning_yourself_off_jquery
======
adrianonantua
You lost me at "to do X in browser Y". One of the main reasons to adopt an
experimented and highly used library such a jQuery is that it already deals
with the complication of multiple HTML engines. They already solved that
problem. Their code is tested and less likely to have bugs than my code.

~~~
malandrew
Most of the "to do X in browser Y" apply to older browsers ( _cough_ IE6
_cough_ ) and is rarely an issue in newer browsers which have been much better
about following standards. If you use automated testing and do cross browser
testing via Karma or JS TestDriver, you'll spot the very rare cross browser
gotcha.

TBH with an attitude like that, you're keeping yourself dependent on jQuery
and therefore preventing yourself from progressing as a professional software
engineer.

~~~
xfour
Wow that's an asinine elitest sounding statement. So reinventing the wheel to
feature test or browser test pieces of javascript code for rudimentary
differences within browsers, that will probably be around less time than the
jQuery library, is the only way to progress, as a "professional software
engineer" your programming world view is very narrow.

The point of the original article is valid though, you can't have modules
including jQuery, just not gonna scale.

~~~
malandrew
It is only by reinventing the wheel that progress is made. Do you want an
internet that is still mostly jQuery-based in 5-10 years? Ya know, "640K ought
to be enough for anybody."

jQuery made sense before you had somewhat sane module systems like
CommonJS+Browserify and Require.js and accompanying build systems.

To keep using a monolithic library that includes kitchens sinks from 2006 when
much better approaches exist in 2013 is asinine. I'm really happy that many
engineers from the worlds of Python, C, Ruby, Java, Clojure, Haskell, etc. are
all crossing over more and more into JavaScript over the past 3 years or so.
90% of all the progress I've seen in the JavaScript work has come from
outsiders that show up in the world of JavaScript and DOM and think to
themselves "WTF is this shit?!?1 How in the hell have these guys gone almost
18 years without a proper module system and package system"?" and then proceed
to code up solutions in JavaScript that provide them the comforts and niceties
that they are used to from other programming environments.

I'm primarily a JavaScript developer and I'm very thankful for all the
outsiders improving our ecosystem because most of the people in the JavaScript
work gave up long ago by not looking beyond jQuery.

Alan Kay said it best when he uttered, "They have no idea where [their culture
came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as
a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-
made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

