| I was interested until this: > "Five years ago when jQuery was created, just about every web developer knew JS quite well and understood the quirks of every browser and JS implementation." False. Five years ago programs thought of JavaScript as a silly little non-language to add fantastic effects onto their serious back-end code. When Rails 0.6 added a way to do sort-in-place lists via ajax, and they worked every time, I remember feeling that this was surely some kind of dark magic, because who could write JavaScript that worked all the time with different back-ends? What has actually happened is that the pool of people who used JavaScript five years ago, with in most cases an appropriate dash of fear, are now quite competent JavaScript programmers who can do fancy things. And newer programmers can get started with jQuery even without knowing browser quirks from the start, though eventually they have to learn them. jQuery has lowered the barrier to entry, it hasn't made people stupider. It's made the prior intermediate-level js programmers into ninjas, and it's given newbies the power to do cool things and then complain when they find small problems. CoffeeScript is the same. It lowers the barrier to entry for people who don't care to understand why the arguments array isn't a real array, or how functions definitions are hoisted if they don't come as part of a var statement. Yes, this means that new users will complain because they don't understand the technologies underneath. And that's a challenge to us to be a welcoming and educational community that helps them learn. |
Back-end programmers may have felt that way five years ago, but there were plenty of people who were using JavaScript to write highly functional and responsive web pages in 2005. Don't forget that the original XHR object was created by Microsoft with IE5 as a way for Outlook to refresh a web inbox view without a roundtrip to the server.