Marathons, Pirates, and Moving Beyond jQuery | Hacker News Reader

Marathons, Pirates, and Moving Beyond jQuery

intridea.com

6 pointsrenaebair4 comments

I had no idea there was a backlash against jQuery, and though the slidedeck http://www.slideshare.net/rmurphey/the-jquery-divide-5287573 is pretty awesome, I am not sure most web-apps need somebody who knows core javascript vs. knowing jQuery.

I remember writing the whole xmlhttp stuff, and to me, that is ugly code. I'd much rather have $.ajax or $.getJSON. Not only is it easier to write or read, it is also easier for another person to come in later and understand.

I do think people should have a basic understanding of javascript, and I can't imagine writing NOTHING bug jQuery code in any web app, but suggesting that somebody who focuses on jQuery is any less valuable than somebody who focuses on javascript to me seems elitest without much merit (with the exception of a very few outstandingly unique projects which don't fit into the capabilities of jQuery).

Is any javascript app not spaghetti code??

Its not really a knock against jQuery. Its more about how if I'm writing jQuery on a daily basis, I should have a better understanding of the underlying language. Also, jQuery is great in many situations, but its not the tool for every job.

JQuery is still javascript, so there's no worry there. JQuery is an abstraction of the DOM (a light one), not an abstraction of javascript. I don't think you're losing much by not having to know document.getElementsByTagName.

Coffeescript is an abstraction of JS, however, so I don't understand why the author wants to go there (considering he wants to move away from JQuery because of fears that he doesn't know JS).

At my last startup Outspokes, our product was an embeddable JS-widget. While we did load jQuery after initializing the widget, we still used basic Javascript to load the initial widget (think bookmarklet-like code). Because so much of our app was written in JS, we put more effort into structuring models and creating tests for our widget. This was pre-backbone days, so we built out a set of conventions for ourselves.

I agree that jQuery is almost like a superset of JS, and it hides a lot of the nastiness of some day-to-day chores. But it's still good to understand the underlying JS that powers jQuery.

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