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by kordlessagain 1497 days ago
> I think of this story whenever I see jQuery popup on Hacker News. There is always a strong contingent of devs who swear by this library. But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed.

This is a strawman argument. It's a biased view you hold. Because of that, you make up a story to match your biases around people who use such-and-such library don't think they need to update their skill set. I'm not angry about this, but am only pointing out biased arguments create dissonance.

> I see a trend of well-written, evidence backed articles where large, well funded sites are making a case to deprecate jQuery. These fact-based investigations into problems faced by their dev team result in a reasoned decision to remove a dependency that no longer justifies its cost. I encourage everyone to introspect if their defense of jQuery is on an equal technical footing to these types of investigations.

You read something somewhere about how jQuery is a costly dependency. Yet, there are no links that I can see anywhere in the threads here, nor a good rational argument for people to NOT use jQuery because it is a costly dependency. There are opposing opinions on this, but the opinions that it needs to be included via CDN don't address the fact it can be hosted locally and the opinions "who needs all that code to load?" don't take into account that browsers and networks are bonkers fast nowadays. Who cares if it's a bit more code? It's not like jQuery is growing its codebase at the rate compute and network speed increases.

For that matter, could not the same argument be made of JavaScript itself? I taught myself Promises, not because I could stay "relevant", but because it makes good sense to write code that is easy to read and maintain, even if it is me doing both on my project. The code I produced when I wasn't doing Promises was "legacy" the second it hit the repo, and will be "costly" if someone else has to jump in and work on it to convert it to Promises, because they'll have to brain dump what I was thinking (or not) when I wrote it!

This salt and pepper beard stays up on technology. I didn't really write code in the past, but now I'm great at what I do and I fully intend on exploring new technologies when they compliment what I can do rapidly in the frameworks and methods I well understand, if that's what it takes to get to market faster.

2 comments

> Who cares if it's a bit more code

Well, Gov.uk for one, as per the article you're commenting on. As they pointed out:

> Not everyone is tapping away on their 2022 MacBook Pro on a rip-roarin' broadband connection. GOV.UK has to be accessible to everyone, and that means keepin' it lean.

> Here's a few of the greatest hits from Matt Hobbs on what GOV.UK noticed in removing jQuery:

> - Less front end processing time overall.

> - 11% less blocking time at the 75th percentile.

> - 10% less blocking time for users at the 95th percentile. These are users who experience seriously adverse network and device conditions, and every performance gain matters especially for them.

Yes, but that's a government site that's got an explicitly universal audience and is also pretty lightweight already.

If you're making a game, say, you may (may!) not care if Edna can't load it on a 1993 iMac, and you might be loading 40MB of resources, so another 24kB is not your pressing problem.

Engineering effort is always in short supply, and it is very expensive. Use it wisely. Sweeping judgements gleaned from very different products may not apply to your case.

I can promise you Edna's 1993 Mac is dead and she has an iPad now.
At what point did it cease to matter, though? Can anyone provide information on how many computers, world-wide if that's what we're shooting for, pre-date the mid 2010s? Because, after that, all those computers are plenty fast. Again, this particular library isn't growing much in computational demand. As for the bandwidth, let's assume the worst case is 128Kbps. jquery 3.6.0.min is 88KB. That's about a 6 second download. Then it's cached usually. Sure, there will be people on slower connections, but how many? Maybe Gov needs to do that no matter what, but that's not an excuse for other use cases.
jQuery is not the natural state of the world[1]; it's the use of jQuery that needs to be justified—not the decision not to use it...

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29276656

> > I think of this story whenever I see jQuery popup on Hacker News. There is always a strong contingent of devs who swear by this library. But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed.

> This is a strawman argument.

I'm not sure I follow. It reads to me like the original commenter is arguing that jQuery supporters have out-of-date knowledge. What's the strawman? jQuery supporters?

Yes. Strawmen don't have anything to do with the thing being judged. The supporters are not necessarily grey beards who don't update their knowledge as the times changed. Also, other uses of biases exist in the text:

> his knowledge

Women are programmers too, and there are older ones out there maybe shaking their head at this type of judgement.