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jQuery was the my first language that got me into coding; I had started javascript but it became very difficult to write a short amount of code for some basic things that I was working with back in 2012.

Ruby on Rails was my first framework for developing web applications. I still use it today, but would remove jQuery as a dependency. I thought it was strange how much of dependency it was for certain things like deleting objects for Rails; I guess it was the right tool for the time.

jQuery is/was a beautiful thing in that it was a concise and fairly nice API for interacting with the DOM. I feel like it was the right tool for the time but now a lot of developers have come to learn the cost of DOM interactions especially with mobile browsers. I am not too certain about ES6 but that stems from my ignorance and not any technical concerns.

I think that while there has been strides in understanding how to make rich clients with javascript without performance issues, I do not think there has been anything as simple as using jQuery. I prefer to use Angular now or vanilla javascript if it is a small scale application and while I like/understand Angular, it took an incredible amount of time and work to properly understand what I was doing. Vanilla js can be incredibly performant, but often times I have had to write 3 times the amount of code to get something going which is a costly in time and maintenance.

jQuery was literally something that took a day for me to understand as non-developer. I hope as javascript progresses that API developers focus on simplicity and ease of use when creating the next big javascript framework.



Javascript is a language; jQuery is only a library written in javascript.

I will concede its API became so ubiquitous that it morphed into some kind of pseudo-DSL.




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