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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> * But would you say just stay with those, and don't worry about SASS/LESS, Angular/JQuery/etc..?*

What you use should ultimately be up to you, but I would approach it in the following way :

1. start with what you need to complete the project

2. add new components / frameworks / libraries on a must-have basis

I'd be tempted to recommend ditching jQuery while learning JavaScript, but don't feel that strongly about it. A lot of Stack Overflow answers will be provided with jQuery syntax - so that's something to keep in mind.

Don't worry about SASS/LESS and client side "MVC" frameworks. Until you need them, those are just new fiddly things to learn that distract from the actual point of the exercise.

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I've looked into what it would take just to dump jQuery for DOM traversal and manipulation. It can be done in plain JS, but you end up rewriting a lot of methods to fill in the gaps already filled by jQuery. My conclusion was, it's still easier and more productive to use jQuery.

> It can be done in plain JS, but you end up rewriting a lot of methods to fill in the gaps already filled by jQuery. My conclusion was, it's still easier and more productive to use jQuery.

Of course. That's the entire point of jQuery :/

If your goal is to put up an application - jQuery is basically industry standard. If your goal is to develop a better intuition about how the DOM works - then stick to JavaScript.

Lets just say I need HTML/CSS/JS, how do I know which components/frameworks/libraries are a must have? They all use the underlying tech (unless, and this could be true as I'm very rusty, they enable something fundamentally different)

The only comparison I can make is the difference between ASM and a high level language. I could literally (physically?) see the improved productivity in my workload as I switched from x86 to C. Is there the same level of shift between JS and coffeescript?

> Is there the same level of shift between JS and coffeescript?

Opinion :

I've never used coffeescript, nor have I really been tempted to. JS isn't a conceptually difficult language, and the wrapper libraries (e.g. jQuery) make day-to-day work a snap.

Given that, I can't really see the rationale behind a syntactic sugar layer on top of a mature and straightforward ecosystem. Even back when I wrote Ruby full time, coffeescript felt more annoying than intriguing.

> The only comparison I can make is the difference between ASM and a high level language. I could literally (physically?) see the improved productivity in my workload as I switched from x86 to C.

Oh wow, it's nothing like that at all. JS is already a high level language after all. Syntactic sugar won't be that much of a boon unless you're already proficient with the languages that inspired CS.

Personally, I'm orders of magnitude more productive with C than x86. If I thought I'd see even a fraction of that productivity gain by switching to [insert anything here] I would switch to [insert anything here]. I mean that sincerely.

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