I was going to name John Resig too. He was one of the few programmers who seemed to get it, that a library should be easy to use, even fun. The function names a

I was going to name John Resig too. He was one of the few programmers who seemed to get it, that a library should be easy to use, even fun. The function names are short, chainability helps keep the whole snippet short, the flexible arguments and graceful handling of empty sets --- all these things made it a breeze. The ergonomic improvement over its predecessor, Prototype.js, was remarkable. The internals were impressive too. Making a library that worked with all browsers in those days was no small feat. Furthermore, in its releases, jQuery was always talking about speed --- how must faster it was than the last version. A prioritization of speed is always a good sign.