I don't think your question makes much sense - you aren't going to get very far if you can't or won't distinguish between a language and its common libraries.

I don't think your question makes much sense - you aren't going to get very far if you can't or won't distinguish between a language and its common libraries. One thing I will concede is that using vanilla javascript to manipulate the DOM is very, very painful, which is exactly why libraries like prototype and jquery exist - to help make this less tedious and to make your experience, as a developer, more pleasurable and faster (as well as for your code to be DRYer, but that's just an added bonus, I'd say). When you say "if javascript (were) jquery...", I can't help but think you don't understand jQuery. It's a library for javascript. Would you say "If Ruby were Rails then ..." ? No, you wouldn't, because Ruby on Rails is built on top of the language, just as jQuery is built on top of javascript. Sit down sometime and read the source of jQuery and you will very quickly see that javascript is a really cool language that you can do cool stuff in. If jQuery doesn't float your boat, then maybe you should look at underscore.js - there is a very good annotation for it linked off their website.