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Comment by peterangular | Hacker News Reader

An unsung hero of mine is John Resig... hear me out - TONS of stuff that jQuery had became mainstream over the years, and I think it did a lot to popularize things like AJAX which led to much more dynamic web experiences.

It was the first library that worked consistently well across the board, provided an easy-to-use CSS-selector based experience to query and manipulate the DOM, and had very solid documentation.

I feel like jQuery is/was a mainstay of the web and although we've seen it lose popularity over the years it's still one of the biggest game changers in my web development tooling.

He also is a key player at Khan Academy* which is one of the best online learning resources to date.

All-in-all I think the guy is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial engineer and I would fanboy so hard if I ever met him.

* Not founder of Khan Academy (doh!)

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>>He also started Khan Academy which is one of the best online learning resources to date.

I agree with your points about John Resig (great choice!), except I'm pretty sure that Resig joined Khan Academy in 2011[1] while Salman Khan[2] was the sole founder in 2008[3].

[1] https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/-

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

Ah thanks for the correction! Edited my comment for accuracy =)

I was going to name John Resig too. He was one of the few programmers who seemed to get it, that a library should be easy to use, even fun. The function names are short, chainability helps keep the whole snippet short, the flexible arguments and graceful handling of empty sets --- all these things made it a breeze. The ergonomic improvement over its predecessor, Prototype.js, was remarkable.

The internals were impressive too. Making a library that worked with all browsers in those days was no small feat. Furthermore, in its releases, jQuery was always talking about speed --- how must faster it was than the last version. A prioritization of speed is always a good sign.

> The ergonomic improvement over its predecessor, Prototype.js, was remarkable.

It was night and day... I'd also throw MooTools in there too. Not to throw them under the bus as they were baby steps in the right direction. But, jQuery just "got it" and was incredibly well designed under the hood as well.

John Resig does deserve a lot of credit for his work on jQuery and at Khan Academy. Small correction though, he wasn't a founder of Khan Academy. It was started in 2008 by Sal Khan, and Resig joined later in 2011.

Corrected! Thanks for the heads up!!

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