> why does javascript have like 6 different ways to select an element? Because all but one of them existed already when settled on the one that everyone almost

> why does javascript have like 6 different ways to select an element? Because all but one of them existed already when settled on the one that everyone almost universally prefers, but the others can’t be removed. You can just use the one you like and totally ignore the others. > Why does everything have to start with verbose "document."? Because it has to be namespaced to something, and the global document object is by far the best namespace available. You can destructure it once and even assign it to a global if you don’t like that reasoning. > Why are the new functions so long in name and cumbersome to use? Partly because people don’t like how things are so they do the global assignment thing and make sure no one can have nice things; partly because long names are self documenting which is often the best documentation they can guarantee at design time; partly because they expect people will never call these APIs directly. > In jQuery, you can select almost anything with just the constructor. It's simple... and clearly better. Clearly to you? I can think of a bunch of ways I’d rather access the current state of a document, and they can vary a lot depending on my task. > Libraries shouldn't be necessary to write basic DOM manipulation code. That’s a really odd position to take given you’re advocating the choices made by one! > Modern ECMAScript has been promised to do away with all the "hack" libraries like jQuery... and articles like "You might not need jQuery" sprang up in popularity based on new ECMAScript features. Modern ECMAScript didn’t make any of these claims, and didn’t set out to do any of the things jQuery does. ECMAScript has added some language features like let/const, modules, Symbol, classes, async/await. HTML added querySelector and a bunch of other DOM conveniences, as well as fetch. Browser vendors and other organizations have added other APIs for things people want to build applications on. > The problem with the javascript community is nobody actually knows javascript. No, people know whatever framework/lib they work with, which is not the same thing. It's that way because javascript... sucks to use. No, it’s that way because everyone wants JavaScript to be the thing they already shimmed it to be. You might be surprised by what it actually is. There are many problems with it of course, but it’s incredibly capable of being nicer to use than you seem to think. As far as knowing JS, I’d highly recommend just spending some casual time reading MDN. Almost every time I do (which is fairly often) I discover something elegant that I either need immediately or could imagine being helpful soon. If nothing else, it’s always a good insight into how the tools that do 95% of what I want get their job done.