I think it’s like Lisp, or rather the reaction to Lisp. In a world without jQuery every site / devshop uses their own little set of conventions and polyfills (

I think it’s like Lisp, or rather the reaction to Lisp. In a world without jQuery every site / devshop uses their own little set of conventions and polyfills (analogous to macros) to add useful abstractions. In isolation, these are neat. En masse though it means that each site has their own meta language (conventions) which have to be memorized before you can contribute to the code base. Languages like Ruby and Lisp suffer from this too: there are so many minute variants across code based that it becomes hard to truly view them as the same language. jQuery, in the context of JavaScript, is a standardisation track for all those little language additions. Personally, I just use the native APIs. I don’t work with enough people across enough sites to benefit from standardisation. You will probably find a big overlap between proponents of jQuery and professionals — especially contractors — who work with many other people on many different codebases.