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Comment by gred | Hacker News Reader

I can see where you're coming from, but just wanted to add a counterpoint.

I recently removed jQuery from a website, and the YMNNJQ website was one of the bits of info that gave me the nudge to do that. The website in question only used jQuery in a handful of places, it was one of the few third party libraries being used (so the % size savings was significant), and I'm fairly fluent with JS... The website simply hadn't gone through a major update in the past 5 or 6 years, and the browser landscape has shifted enough in that time that the pros/cons weigh differently now.

So I think there are scenarios where this info is sometimes useful in the "I might remove jQuery" sense, and not in the "wow, I'm definitely keeping jQuery!" sense.

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In your example, switching from jQuery was just a matter of personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that.

My original comment left out some context: on HN, a lot of the hostility to jQuery is either cultural or gatekeeping oriented. Cultural opposition is of the 'not invented here' variety, e.g. 'Why use Dropbox when you could do this w/ rsync? Gatekeeping-related opposition is where it's implied that you shouldn't call yourself a dev if you use jQuery and not vanilla JS.

That is the kind of discussion that happens nearly every time a link to YMNNJQ is dropped.

That's not how I see jQuery hate.

jQuery promotes bad development patterns, AND brings a cost for end users. Developers will do themselves and futures devs a favor by not choosing to use it. Is it really gatekeeping to expect people to be aware of commonly used 10 year old features?

I assume developers who share YMNNJQ are just sick of inheriting messy projects built with jQuery. I know I am.

You've never inherited a terrible, unmaintainable React or Angular app? I have on multiple occasions, and in fact my team is dealing with one right now. I'd prefer a jQuery mess to an Angular/React mess any day of the week. With old-school jQuery apps, at least I can get them to build and can debug the control flow.

A couple of years ago I inherited a client's static site that was written in React before Next.js took off. It is a real accomplishment to make a static site as unnecessarily unmaintainable and convoluted as that one was.

Part of my screening process is making sure something like that doesn't fall in my lap again. Even static sites aren't safe these days.

The article explains why jQuery doesn't promote bad development patterns. That is a consequence of bad development and a misunderstanding of what jQuery is.

> jQuery promotes bad development patterns

If you do web development as a job, it's your responsibility to stay up to date on what best practices are. With EC2015 being several years ago now, jQuery wouldn't be a learner's starting point today.

Those that developed bad habits during jQuery's heyday a decade ago may still be writing bad code. And it's someone else's job to clean that up. That's the circle of life, and it's hardly exclusive to jQuery users.

> it's implied that you shouldn't call yourself a dev if you use jQuery and not vanilla JS.

I've never seen that. The closest I've come to seeing that is that comments that imply that using jQuery indicates lower levels of experience as a developer.

> Cultural opposition is of the 'not invented here' variety, e.g. 'Why use Dropbox when you could do this w/ rsync?

How is that "not invented here"? That seems more like a preference for open source software.

I looked at submission history and I don't really see either of those attitudes prevalent in a quick scan of the comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youmightnotneedjquery...

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