[cellis]

While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.

[twelvedogs]

jquery was an unoptimised mess? it's like 30k minimised and just bridged a bunch of functionality that browsers lacked as well as providing a generic api that let you (often) ignore per-browser implementation and testing of your code

there's no reason to blame it for the types of websites being made either, it doesn't really provide enough functionality to influence the type of site you use it on

[throwup238]

Since when did we start using file size as a measure of efficiency or optimization?

Off the top of my head: $() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById, both of which predate jquery by years. Every $('.my-class') created wrapped objects with overhead. Something like $('#myButton').click(fn) involved creating an intermediate object just to attach an event listener you could’ve done natively. The deeper the method chaining got the worse the performance penalty, and devs rarely cached the selectors even in tight loops. It was the PHP of Javascript, which is really saying something.

By the early-2010s most of the library was dead weight since everyone started shipping polyfills but people kept plopping down jquery-calendar like it was 2006.

(I say this as someone who has fond memories of using Jquery in 2007 to win a national competition in high school, after which I became a regular contributor for years)

[JimDabell]

> $() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById, both of which predate jquery by years.

You have that backwards – jQuery predates querySelector by years.

The reason why getElementById is fast is because it’s a simple key lookup.

[wtetzner]

Both querySelector and querySelectorAll came well after jquery. I remember it being a big deal when browsers added support for them.

[twelvedogs]

> By the early-2010s most of the library was dead weight

absolutely correct this is because a lot of the shit jquery did was good and people built it into the browser because of that

putting jquery into a site now would be insane but at the time it pushed forward the web by quite a leap

[ulbu]

3 counts of “jquery” in the text. once again, which one of them glorifies it?