The way most developers work with JavaScript (especially jQuery) is fundamentally broken and untestable. This was one of the most difficult things I fought with

The way most developers work with JavaScript (especially jQuery) is fundamentally broken and untestable. This was one of the most difficult things I fought with when using backbone and introducing developers to backbone. You can work with it the way that you know, but that is the hard way. It will make team scaling more difficult than it needs to be and you will be missing out on what the majority of the framework does for you. This is a major reason why I am coming around to Angular. Take away jQuery and developers have to stop and think. It makes it difficult to rush ahead chaining dozens of callbacks and tightly coupling their code to the DOM, in the familiar jQuery way. This, above all else, is what allows you to create a single page web application. The rest is just gravy on top.