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by ratww 1486 days ago
> Add enough helper functions are you're at jQuery anyway.

I really hate these exaggerations. jQuery is, last I checked, over 200k unminified. Anyone writing enough helper functions to get to a fraction of that is already a pathological case.
1 comments
wvenable 1486 days ago
Browsing the source of jQuery and I don't find it bloated but I find a lot of knowledge in there that a naive user the DOM API would most likely know about.

It's kind of like how you can comparing languages using simple example code isn't relevant because proper code with full error handling and edge case handling can be very different from a naive example.

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ratww 1485 days ago
That's not the point.

The point is that this is a strawman. "Enough helper functions" to get to jQuery is 288580 bytes. A quarter of that, or even a tenth of that, is already a pathological case and way beyond almost every case of "jQuery substitution" that would happen in practice.

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wvenable 1485 days ago
I could read and understand the entire jQuery source code in a single afternoon -- it's not that big. Even in the few minutes I spent reading it, I learned a few things I didn't know.

The worst thing about the web as a platform is the need to count bytes.

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ratww 1485 days ago
Once again, my friend, that's not the point, and I'm not even talking about it anywhere. I get it that you like jQuery, but your reply defending it has absolutely nothing to do with my reply.

Nobody is reimplementing the 280k of jQuery as part of their projects, so no, you won't be "at jQuery anyway". That's bullshit.

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wvenable 1485 days ago
I don't like jQuery -- I mean I use it but it doesn't occupy enough brain space to even have a strong opinion on it either way. If I took jQuery out then I'd have to care more because would need to re-implement all the pieces of jQuery that my projects already use. Is that going to be 280k worth? No. Is going to be a couple of one-liners? No, because jQuery hides a lot of complexity under it's relatively simple API that take a lot of JavaScript to reproduce.

It's not crazy that to accomplish what jQuery accomplishes without jQuery you're going to need almost the same amount of code as jQuery. It's not re-implementing the DOM -- it's a pretty thin but broad wrapper. If you don't need something, remove it.

https://github.com/jquery/jquery#how-to-build-your-own-jquer...

The whole point of using a library is to outsource the problem somewhere else.

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ratww 1485 days ago
Alright, we seem to be talking past each other. Maybe that's the sign this is not a productive discussion.

I'm not calling jQuery is bloated or difficult to read, nor I am telling anyone they should count bytes.

> Is going to be a couple of one-liners? No, because jQuery hides a lot of complexity under it's relatively simple API that take a lot of JavaScript to reproduce. > It's not crazy that to accomplish what jQuery accomplishes without jQuery you're going to need almost the same amount of code as jQuery

Once again, that's my whole point.

What I'm saying is that jQuery isn't a 100-line library. The whole of jQuery is not being trivially reimplemented at several places. Projects reimplementing portions of jQuery functionality (a la youmightnotneedjquery.com) are usually only reimplementing very very few things, and are leaving out lots of stuff. Different projects have different needs, some people don't need the whole library, some do, others don't care. That's it.

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