[malandrew]

It is only by reinventing the wheel that progress is made. Do you want an internet that is still mostly jQuery-based in 5-10 years? Ya know, "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

jQuery made sense before you had somewhat sane module systems like CommonJS+Browserify and Require.js and accompanying build systems.

To keep using a monolithic library that includes kitchens sinks from 2006 when much better approaches exist in 2013 is asinine. I'm really happy that many engineers from the worlds of Python, C, Ruby, Java, Clojure, Haskell, etc. are all crossing over more and more into JavaScript over the past 3 years or so. 90% of all the progress I've seen in the JavaScript work has come from outsiders that show up in the world of JavaScript and DOM and think to themselves "WTF is this shit?!?1 How in the hell have these guys gone almost 18 years without a proper module system and package system"?" and then proceed to code up solutions in JavaScript that provide them the comforts and niceties that they are used to from other programming environments.

I'm primarily a JavaScript developer and I'm very thankful for all the outsiders improving our ecosystem because most of the people in the JavaScript work gave up long ago by not looking beyond jQuery.

Alan Kay said it best when he uttered, "They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."