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I disagree with your characterization. Take jQuery for example. 1. Small, fast and minimal. 2. Easy to create plugins. 3. Budding ecosystem and ex

by steego 11y ago

I disagree with your characterization. Take jQuery for example. 1. Small, fast and minimal. 2. Easy to create plugins. 3. Budding ecosystem and explosion of plugins. 4. Conflicts ensued and some plugins got pulled into the core project. Eventually, the growth of jQuery tapered off as the project stabilized. Not only did the size taper off, it got smaller as well. After nearly 10 years, we're talking about a payload of 30K minified and gzipped. https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold if your team is disciplined and dedicated to keeping it small. You simply can't expect to your 3.0 to be as small as your 1.0 because it's very unlikely you're going to know upfront how people are going to use your software.

steveklabnik 11y ago
While this is true, and I love JQuery, there's a significant number of JavaScript programmers who do say that JQuery is bloated and slow and old and you shouldn't use it. http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ and all that. Even if it's not actually true (as you've said, it literally is not bloated wrt filesize) people still think it's true.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 11y ago
  Kind of a good example of what I mean about how I don't care much about "bloat" anymore... it is my perception that the vast majority of people who fling the term around are not doing so after any sort of careful examination of the system in question and coming to a considered conclusion... it's mostly just an accusation more than anything else. It's not generally a very nice thing to say about a framework, even if you can somehow objectively prove it, it immediately puts the entire conversation on a very hostile footing.
- thiht 11y ago
  Your link explicitely says "you MIGHT not need jQuery", there's nothing wrong about that, quite often you actually don't need it at all. It doesn't say "never use jQuery"
  - Kequc 11y ago
    I find jquery is a good rapid prototyping tool. If you have limited time use it, but you'll spend more time later trying to remove it again. Building and then marketing a library that lists jquery as a dependency is somewhat of a blight these days, isn't it?
- boomlinde 11y ago
  > as you've said, it literally is not bloated wrt filesize At what point does software become bloated? I disagree that you can approach measuiring size bloat with absolute file size as the only factor. I rather tend to think of bloat in terms of comparing the solution to other options to achieve the same result. In that sense, if I use jQuery for something that I might as well use plain DOM for, e.g. waiting for the document to load fully before selecting an element to change its content, the level of bloat the additional 30k adds to do the same is ridiculous. Of course, if you take into account the whole stack of software running from the bare metal up to your browser window, 30k might appear negligible, but when you have a few tabs open with sites that all load hundreds of kilobytes of badly generated CSS, JS frameworks and pictures, and the actual rendering and execution of these consume orders of magnitude more run-time memory, it all adds up.
- steego 11y ago
  My point wasn't if jQuery is a bloated library or not, but whether its plugin system caused it to bloat beyond its original purpose.
- joshburgess 11y ago
  Certain things in jQuery are definitely dated & slow. It has a pretty meh implementation of promises, and the .animate library has pretty bad performance. That's why things like Velocity.js exist.
jerf 11y ago
"The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold" Don't recall claiming everything is under the "cycle of bloat". The fact that I gave specific examples was a pretty big clue that it's not all equal.... and jQuery isn't in any of them, either. Edit: Sorry, is there something wrong with my pointing out that I didn't ever claim the things being imputed to me?
- johnmaguire2013 11y ago
  The problem is you haven't given a single example of any software that fits the model, and people are continuing to provide counter-examples. I can make lists too, if that's all we're doing. 1. Get a cat. 2. Cat requires playtime or they ruin your stuff and can be annoying. 3. Repeat 1 and 2 a few times. 4. You are a crazy cat man.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "The problem is you haven't given a single example of any software that fits the model," Of course not. It's categories of software that have the cycle of bloat. I named three, by implication "text editors" are a fourth. Based on the way people seem to be blinded by the word "bloat" naming specific examples would be seen as an attack, followed by vigorous defenses of how it's not "bloat", which, at least as far as I'm concerned, is a total waste of time because as you can see in other messages I consider the whole "bloat" concept a joke anyhow, so why stir up the conversation like that unnecessarily? Naming the specific instances is irrelevant, because it's not about the specific instantiations. It's not the software, it's the cycle. Pretty much every text editor ever has started out as a "lean, fast" text editor. And then they grew. And then someone claimed that all the existing text editors are "bloated" and set out to make their own text editor.
    - judah 11y ago
      > Pretty much every text editor ever has started out as a "lean, fast" text editor. And then they grew. Not Notepad. http://notepadconf.com http://notepadconf.com
mikeryan 11y ago
Jquery is a lot of things but minimal isn't really accurate. Combining a DOM manipulation library with an AJAX library and a Promises/Deferred library is and has been a pain point for me. Also some of those size reductions have been at the cost of features (in particular by reducing the target browser set) Its a great project. I use it a lot but I'm not sure its a counterpoint to bloat.
- steego 11y ago
  > I use it a lot but I'm not sure its a counterpoint to bloat. You're missing my point. I'm not claiming jQuery is not bloated, what I'm claiming is jQuery hasn't bloated (grown) a lot since it was first introduced. It started out as a single one-stop-shop library to handle DOM manipulation, AJAX and event handling and the scope/size of the project hasn't really grown beyond that.

by steego 11y ago

steveklabnik 11y ago

While this is true, and I love JQuery, there's a significant number of JavaScript programmers who do say that JQuery is bloated and slow and old and you shouldn't use it. http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ and all that. Even if it's not actually true (as you've said, it literally is not bloated wrt filesize) people still think it's true.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jerf 11y ago
Kind of a good example of what I mean about how I don't care much about "bloat" anymore... it is my perception that the vast majority of people who fling the term around are not doing so after any sort of careful examination of the system in question and coming to a considered conclusion... it's mostly just an accusation more than anything else. It's not generally a very nice thing to say about a framework, even if you can somehow objectively prove it, it immediately puts the entire conversation on a very hostile footing.
thiht 11y ago
Your link explicitely says "you MIGHT not need jQuery", there's nothing wrong about that, quite often you actually don't need it at all. It doesn't say "never use jQuery"
- Kequc 11y ago
  I find jquery is a good rapid prototyping tool. If you have limited time use it, but you'll spend more time later trying to remove it again. Building and then marketing a library that lists jquery as a dependency is somewhat of a blight these days, isn't it?
boomlinde 11y ago
> as you've said, it literally is not bloated wrt filesize At what point does software become bloated? I disagree that you can approach measuiring size bloat with absolute file size as the only factor. I rather tend to think of bloat in terms of comparing the solution to other options to achieve the same result. In that sense, if I use jQuery for something that I might as well use plain DOM for, e.g. waiting for the document to load fully before selecting an element to change its content, the level of bloat the additional 30k adds to do the same is ridiculous. Of course, if you take into account the whole stack of software running from the bare metal up to your browser window, 30k might appear negligible, but when you have a few tabs open with sites that all load hundreds of kilobytes of badly generated CSS, JS frameworks and pictures, and the actual rendering and execution of these consume orders of magnitude more run-time memory, it all adds up.
steego 11y ago
My point wasn't if jQuery is a bloated library or not, but whether its plugin system caused it to bloat beyond its original purpose.
joshburgess 11y ago
Certain things in jQuery are definitely dated & slow. It has a pretty meh implementation of promises, and the .animate library has pretty bad performance. That's why things like Velocity.js exist.

jerf 11y ago

"The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold" Don't recall claiming everything is under the "cycle of bloat". The fact that I gave specific examples was a pretty big clue that it's not all equal.... and jQuery isn't in any of them, either. Edit: Sorry, is there something wrong with my pointing out that I didn't ever claim the things being imputed to me?

johnmaguire2013 11y ago
The problem is you haven't given a single example of any software that fits the model, and people are continuing to provide counter-examples. I can make lists too, if that's all we're doing. 1. Get a cat. 2. Cat requires playtime or they ruin your stuff and can be annoying. 3. Repeat 1 and 2 a few times. 4. You are a crazy cat man.
- jerf 11y ago
  "The problem is you haven't given a single example of any software that fits the model," Of course not. It's categories of software that have the cycle of bloat. I named three, by implication "text editors" are a fourth. Based on the way people seem to be blinded by the word "bloat" naming specific examples would be seen as an attack, followed by vigorous defenses of how it's not "bloat", which, at least as far as I'm concerned, is a total waste of time because as you can see in other messages I consider the whole "bloat" concept a joke anyhow, so why stir up the conversation like that unnecessarily? Naming the specific instances is irrelevant, because it's not about the specific instantiations. It's not the software, it's the cycle. Pretty much every text editor ever has started out as a "lean, fast" text editor. And then they grew. And then someone claimed that all the existing text editors are "bloated" and set out to make their own text editor.
  - judah 11y ago
    > Pretty much every text editor ever has started out as a "lean, fast" text editor. And then they grew. Not Notepad. http://notepadconf.com http://notepadconf.com

mikeryan 11y ago

Jquery is a lot of things but minimal isn't really accurate. Combining a DOM manipulation library with an AJAX library and a Promises/Deferred library is and has been a pain point for me. Also some of those size reductions have been at the cost of features (in particular by reducing the target browser set) Its a great project. I use it a lot but I'm not sure its a counterpoint to bloat.

steego 11y ago
> I use it a lot but I'm not sure its a counterpoint to bloat. You're missing my point. I'm not claiming jQuery is not bloated, what I'm claiming is jQuery hasn't bloated (grown) a lot since it was first introduced. It started out as a single one-stop-shop library to handle DOM manipulation, AJAX and event handling and the scope/size of the project hasn't really grown beyond that.