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One of the things I don't think it accounts for in talking about the downfall of something like jQuery is that as time goes on, the questions have already been

One of the things I don't think it accounts for in talking about the downfall of something like jQuery is that as time goes on, the questions have already been asked. So of course there's going to be less questions asked about jQuery in 2017 versus 2009, because if I need to figure out how to select elements based on an attribute rather than a class or id, it's already there.

slig 9y ago
Agreed. It'd be nice to have graphed the number of pageviews of each tag as well.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Just made me think about a great metric as a developer: understanding how popular each SO page is about your library. Ie. "X is still catching up everyone, it's a very busy page. We have done a good job making Y more obvious, people aren't searching for it anymore."
aalleavitch 9y ago
Yeah, it’s not like these sites have stopped using jquery altogether: my site uses React components but I still write a couple lines of jquery here and there for basic uses.
nicoburns 9y ago
Yep! Same for React. It has a much smaller API surface area than Angular (and goes wrong it mysterious ways less often!), so fewer people will be asking questions about it. From my perspective, it appears that React is still very much in ascendancy.
- jsight 9y ago
  The chart seemed to show React to be growing very quickly as well.
- dentemple 9y ago
  From my anecdotal experience of just watching SO's React queue, most questions about React that show up (that aren't repeats) are almost always regarding how it's used with some library in the ecosystem. React-router, Redux, Webpack, Material UI, etc. So even though the API itself small, there's still an endless number of questions out there for people to ask!
jcadam 9y ago
Right, jQuery is good and mature, and I can usually find what I need in the documentation. It will never die. I don't use jQuery by itself these days, of course. I'm using it in combination with mithril.js (not as popular as React, but similar in concept) at the moment.
- puobelle 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/7q81bv/i_dont_use_jquery_by_itself_these_days_of_course/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/7q81...
iambateman 9y ago
This intuitively makes sense, but I'd like to see some control data. Has the volume of PHP questions (for example) fluctuated much over time?
- itcmcgrath 9y ago
  http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    That seems like a pretty compelling counterpoint.
emodendroket 9y ago
Looking at the regex tag would suggest this logic doesn't necessarily hold.
collyw 9y ago
Surely they could have used the number of times questions were viewed rather than asked.
lettergram 9y ago
Indeed! In fact, after I spent time using react and angular for two separate products, I actually switched back to mostly rolling my own JQuery (usually). It just works, and takes up much less of my mindshare than trying to learn various frameworks every time I roll a new site (which incidentally is every 3 - 6 months). There is always more support for it (with all the questions being answered), and the API never changes. I actually develop faster, although typically I’m using web frameworks with templating backends - such as Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), Flask (Python), and Revel (Go)
- jamra 9y ago
  I did that on a product as well. It went pretty well. The issue is with more complicated UI. The more complicated it is, the faster JQuery breaks down. That being said, it's better to have a bit of a spaghetti JQuery than to try and retrain unwilling programmers in Angular.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    jQuery doesn't have to be spaghetti though. It gets that rap I think because most people that used it weren't good/experienced enough to organize bigger code. It can/usually does turn into a mess though but is faster to bang small things out in for me anyway.
    - jamra 9y ago
      It doesn’t have to be spaghetti. You are right. However, when you change state in multiple places, they either have to be aware of each other or you need some kind of state management. The benefit of libraries like React are that they abstract view rendering and take care of DOM diffing. The benefit of frameworks like Angular is that it manages state in addition to what React does. On simpler projects, JQuery is more productive. But my main point is to program where it is comfortable and practical. The better academic choice is not necessarily the better choice. View your programming resources as people and make the pragmatic choice.
codingdave 9y ago
On the same note, the older frameworks solved older problems. jQuery was the killer framework because it handled browser compatibility back in a time when people not only needed to support IE8, but IE6, and few companies felt comfortable telling people to just update their browser. Well, those days are past, so that problem is no longer a reason to choose a framework, and when you take that out of the picture, jQuery just isn't so needed. The same path is likely on all frameworks - they were designed to solve specific use cases, and as the entire industry matures, different solutions will embed themselves in the industry in different ways, reducing the raison d'etre for each framework, over time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- shams93 9y ago
  Yeah with jquery we were composing templates server side. Compared to Vue trying to do a SPA in jQuery is a season in hell. It can be done but it's brutal and fragile.
  - eitland 9y ago
    > It can be done but it's brutal and fragile. Actually many who did jQuery were proud of it. Some of us made rock solid sites or improved exiting ones quite a bit using a technology known as progressive enhancement. Let me tell you what is fragile: the cool things I make today that won't even try to work if I disable Javascript. :-) Edit: and given what we have seen over the last few days now would be a good time to reconsider if every website really needs to be able to run Javascript.
    - djroomba 9y ago
      I miss progressive enhancement, when/why did it die.
      - bronson 9y ago
        Did progressive enhancement ever catch on? It made for some great Rails 2 tutorials but I don't remember seeing it much in the wild. It's going away because you basically have to write everything twice and it's hell to keep consistent.
itcmcgrath 9y ago
"Of course there's going to be less questions" Yet there are counter examples that show that can't be the complete story: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false
- dmitriid 9y ago
  You could argue that jQuery covers handling (a part of) DOM APIs which are updated only rarely. Once you know what $().append().on().trigger() does, there's not that much left to know about jQuery. And most everything can be understood from docs. Python, however, is a continuously evolving language with an ever expanding number of libraries and areas of application.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Python is just an outlier when looking at this. Here's[1] a larger set of languages and frameworks, and given the premise it's not hard to guess the JS frameworks from the graph. 1: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,angularjs,c,c%2B%2B,ruby,javascript]&relative=true http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,angularjs,c,c%2B%2B,rub...
myth_drannon 9y ago
StackOverflow's job posts show the same trend. Jquery is required less and less http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=angularjs%2Creactjs%2Cjquery http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=angularjs%2Creactjs%2Cj...
- lakechfoma 9y ago
  But again probably less <this is losing popularity> and more <this is no longer cool to tag>. That's a really nice tool though
  - myth_drannon 9y ago
    That's a possible explanation too. No one wants to say that the job is mostly maintaining large Angular codebase in addition to a small internal tool written in React that only senior stuff is allowed to play with...But hey we are a React shop!
- Kajayacht 9y ago
  I think part of that is that jQuery is pretty universal and it's probably assumed that if someone says they know JavaScript, they know jQuery. Or, I at least assume that when I'm doing interviews.
  - myth_drannon 9y ago
    I think that would apply more to an Html than Jquery
qaq 9y ago
Very good point and this obviously can skew the results greatly. Working in a fairly senior mid-size team I don't remember any of my colleagues asking any question on SO either so results could be also skewed by composition of user base and how good the docs are for a given proj.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Similarly, JQuery questions remain higher than the other ones in that chart; does that mean JQuery remains popular, or that JQuery is hard and people need a lot of help for it? Speaking for myself, it was often easier to copy / paste SO answers (in jquery) than try and figure things out for myself. I can imagine a lot of beginning developer start with jQuery and go to advanced frameworks after that.
- wwweston 9y ago
  In addition to the possibilities you listed, it might mean: * most sites aren't SPAs, and progressive enhancement of a document with light interactivity via jQuery is a development model that's a good fit for those sites * progressive enhancement of a document is an easier development model to move into from having started to author HTML & CSS than many of the SPA frameworks (note that this is also true of PHP), and many training materials that bring people into web authoring use js+jQuery as the next step * many sites aren't rewriting their codebases particularly frequently, and anything used there remains relevant longer.
jonnycomputer 9y ago
ha, i came here to say this. I'd rather see web traffic results.

slig 9y ago

Agreed. It'd be nice to have graphed the number of pageviews of each tag as well.

Waterluvian 9y ago
Just made me think about a great metric as a developer: understanding how popular each SO page is about your library. Ie. "X is still catching up everyone, it's a very busy page. We have done a good job making Y more obvious, people aren't searching for it anymore."

aalleavitch 9y ago

Yeah, it’s not like these sites have stopped using jquery altogether: my site uses React components but I still write a couple lines of jquery here and there for basic uses.

nicoburns 9y ago

Yep! Same for React. It has a much smaller API surface area than Angular (and goes wrong it mysterious ways less often!), so fewer people will be asking questions about it. From my perspective, it appears that React is still very much in ascendancy.

jsight 9y ago
The chart seemed to show React to be growing very quickly as well.
dentemple 9y ago
From my anecdotal experience of just watching SO's React queue, most questions about React that show up (that aren't repeats) are almost always regarding how it's used with some library in the ecosystem. React-router, Redux, Webpack, Material UI, etc. So even though the API itself small, there's still an endless number of questions out there for people to ask!

jcadam 9y ago

Right, jQuery is good and mature, and I can usually find what I need in the documentation. It will never die. I don't use jQuery by itself these days, of course. I'm using it in combination with mithril.js (not as popular as React, but similar in concept) at the moment.

puobelle 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/7q81bv/i_dont_use_jquery_by_itself_these_days_of_course/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/7q81...

iambateman 9y ago

This intuitively makes sense, but I'd like to see some control data. Has the volume of PHP questions (for example) fluctuated much over time?

itcmcgrath 9y ago
http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false
- emodendroket 9y ago
  That seems like a pretty compelling counterpoint.

emodendroket 9y ago

Looking at the regex tag would suggest this logic doesn't necessarily hold.

collyw 9y ago

Surely they could have used the number of times questions were viewed rather than asked.

lettergram 9y ago

Indeed! In fact, after I spent time using react and angular for two separate products, I actually switched back to mostly rolling my own JQuery (usually). It just works, and takes up much less of my mindshare than trying to learn various frameworks every time I roll a new site (which incidentally is every 3 - 6 months). There is always more support for it (with all the questions being answered), and the API never changes. I actually develop faster, although typically I’m using web frameworks with templating backends - such as Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), Flask (Python), and Revel (Go)

jamra 9y ago
I did that on a product as well. It went pretty well. The issue is with more complicated UI. The more complicated it is, the faster JQuery breaks down. That being said, it's better to have a bit of a spaghetti JQuery than to try and retrain unwilling programmers in Angular.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  jQuery doesn't have to be spaghetti though. It gets that rap I think because most people that used it weren't good/experienced enough to organize bigger code. It can/usually does turn into a mess though but is faster to bang small things out in for me anyway.
  - jamra 9y ago
    It doesn’t have to be spaghetti. You are right. However, when you change state in multiple places, they either have to be aware of each other or you need some kind of state management. The benefit of libraries like React are that they abstract view rendering and take care of DOM diffing. The benefit of frameworks like Angular is that it manages state in addition to what React does. On simpler projects, JQuery is more productive. But my main point is to program where it is comfortable and practical. The better academic choice is not necessarily the better choice. View your programming resources as people and make the pragmatic choice.

codingdave 9y ago

On the same note, the older frameworks solved older problems. jQuery was the killer framework because it handled browser compatibility back in a time when people not only needed to support IE8, but IE6, and few companies felt comfortable telling people to just update their browser. Well, those days are past, so that problem is no longer a reason to choose a framework, and when you take that out of the picture, jQuery just isn't so needed. The same path is likely on all frameworks - they were designed to solve specific use cases, and as the entire industry matures, different solutions will embed themselves in the industry in different ways, reducing the raison d'etre for each framework, over time.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shams93 9y ago
Yeah with jquery we were composing templates server side. Compared to Vue trying to do a SPA in jQuery is a season in hell. It can be done but it's brutal and fragile.
- eitland 9y ago
  > It can be done but it's brutal and fragile. Actually many who did jQuery were proud of it. Some of us made rock solid sites or improved exiting ones quite a bit using a technology known as progressive enhancement. Let me tell you what is fragile: the cool things I make today that won't even try to work if I disable Javascript. :-) Edit: and given what we have seen over the last few days now would be a good time to reconsider if every website really needs to be able to run Javascript.
  - djroomba 9y ago
    I miss progressive enhancement, when/why did it die.
    - bronson 9y ago
      Did progressive enhancement ever catch on? It made for some great Rails 2 tutorials but I don't remember seeing it much in the wild. It's going away because you basically have to write everything twice and it's hell to keep consistent.

itcmcgrath 9y ago

"Of course there's going to be less questions" Yet there are counter examples that show that can't be the complete story: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,python]&relative=false

dmitriid 9y ago
You could argue that jQuery covers handling (a part of) DOM APIs which are updated only rarely. Once you know what $().append().on().trigger() does, there's not that much left to know about jQuery. And most everything can be understood from docs. Python, however, is a continuously evolving language with an ever expanding number of libraries and areas of application.
- kbenson 9y ago
  Python is just an outlier when looking at this. Here's[1] a larger set of languages and frameworks, and given the premise it's not hard to guess the JS frameworks from the graph. 1: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,angularjs,c,c%2B%2B,ruby,javascript]&relative=true http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[jquery,angularjs,c,c%2B%2B,rub...

myth_drannon 9y ago

StackOverflow's job posts show the same trend. Jquery is required less and less http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=angularjs%2Creactjs%2Cjquery http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=angularjs%2Creactjs%2Cj...

lakechfoma 9y ago
But again probably less <this is losing popularity> and more <this is no longer cool to tag>. That's a really nice tool though
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  That's a possible explanation too. No one wants to say that the job is mostly maintaining large Angular codebase in addition to a small internal tool written in React that only senior stuff is allowed to play with...But hey we are a React shop!
Kajayacht 9y ago
I think part of that is that jQuery is pretty universal and it's probably assumed that if someone says they know JavaScript, they know jQuery. Or, I at least assume that when I'm doing interviews.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  I think that would apply more to an Html than Jquery

qaq 9y ago

Very good point and this obviously can skew the results greatly. Working in a fairly senior mid-size team I don't remember any of my colleagues asking any question on SO either so results could be also skewed by composition of user base and how good the docs are for a given proj.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

Similarly, JQuery questions remain higher than the other ones in that chart; does that mean JQuery remains popular, or that JQuery is hard and people need a lot of help for it? Speaking for myself, it was often easier to copy / paste SO answers (in jquery) than try and figure things out for myself. I can imagine a lot of beginning developer start with jQuery and go to advanced frameworks after that.

wwweston 9y ago
In addition to the possibilities you listed, it might mean: * most sites aren't SPAs, and progressive enhancement of a document with light interactivity via jQuery is a development model that's a good fit for those sites * progressive enhancement of a document is an easier development model to move into from having started to author HTML & CSS than many of the SPA frameworks (note that this is also true of PHP), and many training materials that bring people into web authoring use js+jQuery as the next step * many sites aren't rewriting their codebases particularly frequently, and anything used there remains relevant longer.

jonnycomputer 9y ago

ha, i came here to say this. I'd rather see web traffic results.