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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

If a guide recommends jQuery as a central basic in 2017, it's hard to agree. Sure, it can have its uses in old projects and simple one-off scripts, but for any reasonably sized project with reasonable browser support you will be going with something else. Is it still worth knowing? Sure. Is it something you should learn first? Absolutely not.

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Modern SPA tools require heavy tooling, which is fine but too overwhelming for a beginner. Even if the tools are easy to set up (create-react-app, next.js) they are thick layers, and when you start you better be closer to basics. jQuery is more basic.

Besides, not every project requires single page application interface. Sometimes, you'd be more productive with server-side rendering in classic framework like Rails and Django and and a bit of JS inside $(document).ready().

This. Thankfully, the only thing 'foundational' about the web is the pure languages that it is built upon, and not its frameworks.

The reason I had a 'web-development epiphany' is that I moved away from for months fleetingly trying to hack jQuery into my web projects, and then suddenly grokked React within days.

If you come from a programming background (and especially a functional one at that), learning ES6 javascript with a more modern framework (React, Angular, Vue) is the way to go.

If you read the legend, you would see that jQuery is color-coded under the "possibilities" category. This seems reasonable. There is a ton of work out there that requires familiarity with jQuery but it's not foundational or the only way to make a front-end by any means.

Similarly I'm confused at the 'personal recommendation' of gulp over npm scripts. Does anyone really use gulp for new projects..?

Is gulp seriously so out of fashion already?

I heard webpack is in now. Grunt and Gulp have gone the way of the <marquee> tag.

It was used to hack together build pipelines since the tools didn't fit together nicely, creating hard to debug messes which we grew tired of. Those hacks can be replaced with webpack and you're often left with a few snippets that fit nicely in the script section of package.json (npm scripts). Gulp is still useful for some projects, but a lot less often.

I liked gulp, but it does seem like webpack has the mindshare going forward. If your using the Angular CLI then your project is using webpack.

While I agree that I wouldn't use jQuery in just about any meaningful project going forward I wouldn't dismiss it when you're on the learning path. jQuery serves as an incredibly good bridge between "I can write a for loop" and "I can build non-trivial web apps". The real trick is teaching why jQuery is useful without letting it become a crutch.

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