4 ms·

Whenever I hear "You don't need jQuery!" I immediately ask myself: is this guy/girl younger than 25?

by brakmic 11y ago

karlshea 11y ago
I think even people that are older sometimes forget how terrible it was to develop with JavaScript before things like Prototype and jQuery came on the scene. Just moving from alert() to console.log() was a revelation.
- brakmic 11y ago
  You're right! Forgetting to say "thank you" to people who helped us a lot is something that happens more than often in IT. I still remember when I heard of jQuery. It was in 2007 and it was so amazing. Yes, I admit, the 'alert()/console.log()' was amazing :)
  - karlshea 11y ago
    I'd just like to go back and show 15-year-ago me Firebug or Chrome/Firefox's DevTools and inspector. It's pretty stunning how far the tooling has come and what you can do with it.
    - antod 11y ago
      Heh, nearly that far back I was wishing I could install Venkman in IE. JQuery and Firebug deserve a lot of credit for bringing some sanity to JS/web development. Sure things have moved on now, but they were ground breaking.
      - aidos 11y ago
        Man, it was 2006 (10 years ago!) when Firebug, Drosera [1] and Web Inspector [2] were all released. There were definitely a lot of people eager to have some tools to make front end web dev easier back then. I never worked with Venkman but I recall all too well the hellish time I had debugging JS back around the turn of the millennium. IE was laughable, if there was an error in a script somewhere it would often just say error on line -1. [1] https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/ https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/ [2] https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/ https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/
        antod 11y ago
        That part about the line numbers in IE error messages was exactly the pain I was thinking of :)
    - brakmic 11y ago
      Sadly, we can't go back in time. But we should at least be grateful in the opposite direction.
  - vatotemking 11y ago
    I'd like to say thank you to the author of iepngfix. You da real mvp. [0] [0] - https://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/ https://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
- dj_doh 11y ago
  Write less, Do more. In its truest sense.
FnuGk 11y ago
i am confused. What do you expected them to be? and why is it relevant?
- simonw 11y ago
  If you were writing JavaScript 8 years ago, a library like jQuery was pretty much essential to help patch over the enormous numbers of browser bugs and differences between the various IEs, Firefox, Safari and Opera. My experience is definitely that developers under 25 are much less likely to understand the historic context that jQuery came from, and hence have less respect for what it achieved (and continues to achieve).
  - blowski 11y ago
    I've had exactly this type of conversation with a young junior dev. "AJAX requests are easy - just use the Forms API." They have no idea that in 2005 I read a whole book on 'how to make an AJAX request'.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Just getting a reference to the XMLHttpRequest object required twelve lines of code :|
alexc05 11y ago
Well, I'm 40 and prefer using front end frameworks (angular, mithril, react) to jQuery nowadays. Additionally, there are times when I find (for little things) native javascript is quicker and more useful. I think the sea change for me was not using front end frameworks, but when I first started trying to play with nodejs. As soon as I started working with that AND started coming to understand the async nature of javascript, my entire world shifted underneath me. In hindsight, I'm amazed that I managed to remain employed for so long while NOT knowing that javascript was async. Oh well. Such is life. Anyways, I've definitely said "you don't need jQuery" on numerous occasions. There are plenty of places where it is the best and cheapest solution, but other times when it isn't (or isn't available).
- meo2 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/?q=is+javascript+asynchronous https://www.google.com/?q=is+javascript+asynchronous
  - alexc05 11y ago
    Ahh.... lovely, thank you. So what I'm referring to as "asynchronous javascript" is technically a colloquialism used to describe the event-driven callback-y nature of the code. I'm not sure I'm still against referring to javascript as asynchronous or at least as having asynchronous methods for the purposes shorthand and quick communication. Consider the code (or paste it into a chrome console) function _done(){ console.log(arguments) } var db = window.openDatabase("dbfoo", 1, "test db", 5e6) db.transaction(function(tx){ tx.executeSql('CREATE TABLE t1(a, b PRIMARY KEY);', _done, _done) }) console.log("i happen before the line above me") Notice how the lines of code complete out of order. I think it's really useful to think of that as asynchronous code. It appears I'm using async as a term interchangeably with non-blocking... which may not be correct. So it may be the case that my nomenclature is off, but I'm sure I got that from somewhere. Perhaps a lot of people were referring to node as async in the early days, I'm re-watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY now, but it doesn't look like Ryan Dahl uses the term async. Anyways, looks like I'll have to train myself to use the right word for it. Thanks for pointing that out without making me feel dumb or being all insulting and internet-y. :) I really appreciate that. EDIT: Hmmm... additionally, to be fair: it appears that some agree that it is OK to refer to parts of javascript as async http://stackoverflow.com/a/16524240/398055 http://stackoverflow.com/a/16524240/398055 so it might not be perfectly accurate, but it isn't wildly inaccurate either.
nostrademons 11y ago
I'm 34, been developing web stuff for over 10 years now, and started using JQuery back when John Resig was still personally meeting & greeting people who were using JQuery at meetups. I'm pretty firmly in the "You don't need JQuery camp", and the reason is that you don't need JQuery now. It was an amazing piece of software when it came out; it made rich JS development not only practical, but easy, without worrying about cross-browser issues. But it succeeded. Resig's goal - from very early on, at least as soon as he started to working at Mozilla - was to get JQuery baked into browsers, and he's largely done that. We got querySelectorAll. We got a unified event model that all browsers support. We got FormData. We got a consistent box model, and consistent getComputedStyle() behavior. We got animations and transitions, and the native versions even run on the GPU for fast mobile performance. As a result, most of the problems that JQuery solved just aren't problems in modern web development. Cross-browser issues are minor and getting smaller every day. Selectors are baked in. Animations and transitions are CSS one-liners, rather than needing to spin up a setTimeout loop and manually calculate the delta in the property each tick. That doesn't deny the historical significance of JQuery, or just how much it improved web development back in 2007. But we build apps for the world we live in today, and today, JQuery gives you some minor programming convenience in exchange for 30K of download size and a bunch of layout thrashing if you use its CSS or dimensions methods.
danielsamuels 11y ago
I'm 24, but I grew up supporting IE6 and remember trying to get cross compatibility working for the mess that we called 'browsers' back then. It's been great to see the evolution of Javascript over the last 10 or so years, it's fairly obvious how many of the new features we take for granted came from jQuery originally. I do avoid jQuery now though, I can't remember the last time I used it.
tlrobinson 11y ago
This seems to suggest that we really don't need jQuery any more.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Or that, you know, the younger generation rediscovers the square wheel.
spoiler 11y ago
I am 22, and I have used jQuery. I loved jQuery, and it was a fascinating library that solved a lot of problems. It is still a great library, if one needs to support legacy browsers.I also think that jQuery influenced the DOM API to some extent; good things were adopted, bad ones were improved. However today, I don't think it's as useful—I am not saying it isn't useful—as it once was. The overhead to support multiple modern browsers is usually very low, and often it's even none. I also believe most of the problems people point about jQuery is that at some point a lot of confident, but bad developers, started using it and somehow jQurey unjustly gained that bad reputation.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  It's the people who "program" in jQuery as a way to avoid learning JavaScript who mess up its reputation.

Whenever I hear "You don't need jQuery!" I immediately ask myself: is this guy/girl younger than 25?

by brakmic 11y ago

Whenever I hear "You don't need jQuery!" I immediately ask myself: is this guy/girl younger than 25?

I think even people that are older sometimes forget how terrible it was to develop with JavaScript before things like Prototype and jQuery came on the scene. Just moving from alert() to console.log() was a revelation.

brakmic 11y ago
You're right! Forgetting to say "thank you" to people who helped us a lot is something that happens more than often in IT. I still remember when I heard of jQuery. It was in 2007 and it was so amazing. Yes, I admit, the 'alert()/console.log()' was amazing :)
- karlshea 11y ago
  I'd just like to go back and show 15-year-ago me Firebug or Chrome/Firefox's DevTools and inspector. It's pretty stunning how far the tooling has come and what you can do with it.
  - antod 11y ago
    Heh, nearly that far back I was wishing I could install Venkman in IE. JQuery and Firebug deserve a lot of credit for bringing some sanity to JS/web development. Sure things have moved on now, but they were ground breaking.
    - aidos 11y ago
      Man, it was 2006 (10 years ago!) when Firebug, Drosera [1] and Web Inspector [2] were all released. There were definitely a lot of people eager to have some tools to make front end web dev easier back then. I never worked with Venkman but I recall all too well the hellish time I had debugging JS back around the turn of the millennium. IE was laughable, if there was an error in a script somewhere it would often just say error on line -1. [1] https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/ https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/ [2] https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/ https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/
      - antod 11y ago
        That part about the line numbers in IE error messages was exactly the pain I was thinking of :)
  - brakmic 11y ago
    Sadly, we can't go back in time. But we should at least be grateful in the opposite direction.
- vatotemking 11y ago
  I'd like to say thank you to the author of iepngfix. You da real mvp. [0] [0] - https://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/ https://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
dj_doh 11y ago
Write less, Do more. In its truest sense.

FnuGk 11y ago

i am confused. What do you expected them to be? and why is it relevant?

simonw 11y ago
If you were writing JavaScript 8 years ago, a library like jQuery was pretty much essential to help patch over the enormous numbers of browser bugs and differences between the various IEs, Firefox, Safari and Opera. My experience is definitely that developers under 25 are much less likely to understand the historic context that jQuery came from, and hence have less respect for what it achieved (and continues to achieve).
- blowski 11y ago
  I've had exactly this type of conversation with a young junior dev. "AJAX requests are easy - just use the Forms API." They have no idea that in 2005 I read a whole book on 'how to make an AJAX request'.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Just getting a reference to the XMLHttpRequest object required twelve lines of code :|

alexc05 11y ago

Well, I'm 40 and prefer using front end frameworks (angular, mithril, react) to jQuery nowadays. Additionally, there are times when I find (for little things) native javascript is quicker and more useful. I think the sea change for me was not using front end frameworks, but when I first started trying to play with nodejs. As soon as I started working with that AND started coming to understand the async nature of javascript, my entire world shifted underneath me. In hindsight, I'm amazed that I managed to remain employed for so long while NOT knowing that javascript was async. Oh well. Such is life. Anyways, I've definitely said "you don't need jQuery" on numerous occasions. There are plenty of places where it is the best and cheapest solution, but other times when it isn't (or isn't available).

meo2 11y ago
https://www.google.com/?q=is+javascript+asynchronous https://www.google.com/?q=is+javascript+asynchronous
- alexc05 11y ago
  Ahh.... lovely, thank you. So what I'm referring to as "asynchronous javascript" is technically a colloquialism used to describe the event-driven callback-y nature of the code. I'm not sure I'm still against referring to javascript as asynchronous or at least as having asynchronous methods for the purposes shorthand and quick communication. Consider the code (or paste it into a chrome console) function _done(){ console.log(arguments) } var db = window.openDatabase("dbfoo", 1, "test db", 5e6) db.transaction(function(tx){ tx.executeSql('CREATE TABLE t1(a, b PRIMARY KEY);', _done, _done) }) console.log("i happen before the line above me") Notice how the lines of code complete out of order. I think it's really useful to think of that as asynchronous code. It appears I'm using async as a term interchangeably with non-blocking... which may not be correct. So it may be the case that my nomenclature is off, but I'm sure I got that from somewhere. Perhaps a lot of people were referring to node as async in the early days, I'm re-watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY now, but it doesn't look like Ryan Dahl uses the term async. Anyways, looks like I'll have to train myself to use the right word for it. Thanks for pointing that out without making me feel dumb or being all insulting and internet-y. :) I really appreciate that. EDIT: Hmmm... additionally, to be fair: it appears that some agree that it is OK to refer to parts of javascript as async http://stackoverflow.com/a/16524240/398055 http://stackoverflow.com/a/16524240/398055 so it might not be perfectly accurate, but it isn't wildly inaccurate either.

nostrademons 11y ago

I'm 34, been developing web stuff for over 10 years now, and started using JQuery back when John Resig was still personally meeting & greeting people who were using JQuery at meetups. I'm pretty firmly in the "You don't need JQuery camp", and the reason is that you don't need JQuery now. It was an amazing piece of software when it came out; it made rich JS development not only practical, but easy, without worrying about cross-browser issues. But it succeeded. Resig's goal - from very early on, at least as soon as he started to working at Mozilla - was to get JQuery baked into browsers, and he's largely done that. We got querySelectorAll. We got a unified event model that all browsers support. We got FormData. We got a consistent box model, and consistent getComputedStyle() behavior. We got animations and transitions, and the native versions even run on the GPU for fast mobile performance. As a result, most of the problems that JQuery solved just aren't problems in modern web development. Cross-browser issues are minor and getting smaller every day. Selectors are baked in. Animations and transitions are CSS one-liners, rather than needing to spin up a setTimeout loop and manually calculate the delta in the property each tick. That doesn't deny the historical significance of JQuery, or just how much it improved web development back in 2007. But we build apps for the world we live in today, and today, JQuery gives you some minor programming convenience in exchange for 30K of download size and a bunch of layout thrashing if you use its CSS or dimensions methods.

danielsamuels 11y ago

I'm 24, but I grew up supporting IE6 and remember trying to get cross compatibility working for the mess that we called 'browsers' back then. It's been great to see the evolution of Javascript over the last 10 or so years, it's fairly obvious how many of the new features we take for granted came from jQuery originally. I do avoid jQuery now though, I can't remember the last time I used it.

tlrobinson 11y ago

This seems to suggest that we really don't need jQuery any more.

coldtea 11y ago
Or that, you know, the younger generation rediscovers the square wheel.

spoiler 11y ago

I am 22, and I have used jQuery. I loved jQuery, and it was a fascinating library that solved a lot of problems. It is still a great library, if one needs to support legacy browsers.I also think that jQuery influenced the DOM API to some extent; good things were adopted, bad ones were improved. However today, I don't think it's as useful—I am not saying it isn't useful—as it once was. The overhead to support multiple modern browsers is usually very low, and often it's even none. I also believe most of the problems people point about jQuery is that at some point a lot of confident, but bad developers, started using it and somehow jQurey unjustly gained that bad reputation.

DonHopkins 11y ago
It's the people who "program" in jQuery as a way to avoid learning JavaScript who mess up its reputation.