It took a minute, but I believe we have arrived at Baby Bear on the jQuery conversation. Some choice quotes from the ensemble cast blog post:
Nathanael Anderson: The biggest negative for jQuery in this day and age is that browsers are a lot more standard in coverage and directly messing with the DOM is slow unless you can do everything at one time; and jQuery was not designed for large change groups.
Todd Motto: Final thing from me: let’s not aim to dissuade jQuery developers from using it – it’s amazing, extremely mature and powerful, and its place in “modern web” has shifted, that’s all. In 5 years we’ll all be doing it wrong again.
TJ VanToll: To me, jQuery remains the gold standard for a library with an elegant API design and comprehensive documentation. Although I may not use it in every app nowadays, I still find it the easiest way to interact with the DOM and add powerful widgets to my apps.
And coincidentally, in Nicholas C. Zakas’s newsletter:
I ran into a former coworker shortly after leaving Yahoo as he was preparing to join a new company as a tech lead. During our conversation, he mentioned that his top priority would be to switch them over to YUI. The company was using jQuery, and he said he really didn’t want to use it. I gently suggested that, perhaps, this wasn’t really a battle he wanted to wage. He could certainly evaluate the overall architecture to see what improvements would be made, but going into a company and trying to get everyone to switch to your favorite library or framework is rarely a formula for success.
When I joined Box, I ran into a similar situation except that people seemed to assume that I would try to eliminate jQuery from the front-end. Time after time I was asked, “are you going to get rid of jQuery?” My response was always the same: “No, jQuery isn’t going anywhere. However, I want to make sure its position in the architecture is well-defined.”
Pledging allegiance to a particular technology or approach is fine so long as you don’t become dogmatic about it.
