There are big differences between a language being derived from another language, having it's interpreter written in another language, and actually being a fram

There are big differences between a language being derived from another language, having it's interpreter written in another language, and actually being a framework written in the same language. Your "Don't learn Latin before French" analogy makes sense for those claiming you should learn C before Ruby. But jQuery doesn't derive from Javascript, it's a framework written in Javascript. If you write jQuery, you will run into Javascript issues, because you are writing Javascript. Even if you could make the argument it's a similar philosophical idea, anybody with experience will know in practice that a jQuery coder will run into Javascript issues much, much more frequently than a C++ or assembly issue. The leap is much, much smaller. The best analogy I can think of along the human language lines is instead of a French student learning Latin, it would be a student of business French being encouraged to better understand all of spoken French. With all that said, I also lean towards "just learn what you want or need to know" train of thought. I think those of us who enjoy learning what's under the hood overestimate it's necessity for "getting things done". I don't think there's anything wrong with learning and using jQuery without diving into the messier details of vanilla Javascript unless necessary. Also, for many of us, those ugly situations when we are forced to figure out what's going on behind the scenes is when we actually understand it anyway.