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Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

The problem with jQuery is that, being imperative, it quickly becomes complex when you need to handle more than one thing because you need to cover imperatively all cases.

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Yeah, that's the other HN koan about "You probably don't need React if..." But if you are using jquery/vanilla to shove state into your HTML, you probably actually do need something like react.

It's not really about state but dom updates.

After having some time to think about it, I've seen some really perverse DOM stuff in jquery. Like $(el).next().children(3) type stuff. So I think this stuff really fell-over when there was 'too much state' for the DOM.

I think if you want to go high-dom manipulation a la jQuery, and want some form of complex state, storing the state _on_ the DOM might make sense? Things like data attributes and such, but I also feel like that’s itching for something more like htmx or maybe svelte (I’ve not looked into either enough, so I may be completely off base).

I do agree with the notion that jQuery is easy to mishandle when logic grows beyond a pretty narrow (mostly stateless) scope. It’s fantastic up until that point, and incredibly easy to footgun beyond it.

Yeah, that's the thing, it might make sense in some simple 1-dimensional case, but beyond that it turns into spaghetti code (or a homebrew 'framework'). The big thing is that if you want to re-gigger some of the DOM, React is actually a lot nicer than jquery.

I’ll die on the “give me Vue over react any day” hill in that case, admittedly because I think React’s template/code mix is atrocious. I also _feel_ like React suffers from “why not do everything” syndrome, and that’s from a very naive perspective so grain or mountain of salt

Yeah, I'm not hyping react specifically, just point out that vanilla/jquery or even htmx only works well when the state is not that complicated.

Part of me feels the same way, and ~2015 me was full on SPA believer, but nowadays I sigh a little sigh of relief when I land on a site with the aesthetic markers of PHP and jQuery and not whatever Facebook Marketplace is made out of. Not saying I’d personally want to code in either of them, but I appreciate that they work (or fail) predictably, and usually don’t grind my browser tab to a halt. Maybe it’s because sites that used jQuery and survived, survived because they didn’t exceed a very low threshold of complexity.

Facebook is PHP ironically.

It was once upon a time, hence them moving to HHVM to interpret it, but it’s been all but replaced with a PHP spinoff named Hacklang now.

I think in 2026 Facebook is a conglomeration of a bunch of things... Definitely not just PHP anymore.

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