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by sonnym 4455 days ago
I did not find this list particularly useful. It is a nice attempt, but the way it categorizes libraries can be deceptive. I do not think anyone would consider bower and npm to be comparable projects, except in the most abstract sense. The same applies with node and express; one may as well conflate ruby with rails.

That said, a lot of the tools are really good. I would, personally, argue that underscore is the most important javascript library in existence. It transcends frontend and backend, server and client. It is data manipulation at its finest. It brings functional programming paradigms to javascript. It is beautiful.

After spewing this mantra, one of my colleagues wrote a blog post about it that presents a nice introduction[1]. I would also highly recommend Michael Fogus's book, Functional Javascript[2], that heavily relies on it.

1. http://singlebrook.com/blog/simplify-your-javascript-with-un... 2. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do
2 comments
tieTYT 4455 days ago
They're not very different but I use lodash instead of underscore. Is this "six of one and half a dozen of the other", or is there good reason to stick with underscore?
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jeremya 4455 days ago
I would recommend this podcast on lodash for some of the differences:

http://javascriptjabber.com/079-jsj-lo-dash-with-john-david-...

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Consultant32452 4455 days ago
When I went to that list I was specifically looking for underscore.js and date.js. Seeing a serious project that does not use these libraries makes me twitch.
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notduncansmith 4455 days ago
Personally I prefer Moment.js over Date.js, it hasn't let me down yet and their site + docs are great.

http://momentjs.com/

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hijk 4455 days ago
Maybe you couldn't see underscore.js because it was written as "Underscore"? Or maybe you didn't read the article…
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Consultant32452 4455 days ago
Yeah, underscore was there but date wasn't. I guess my point was that there wasn't a date.js or some reasonable equivalent time library because date/time programming sucks.
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mikeyanderson 4455 days ago
The title says: "A List of Foundational JavaScript Tools" seems like those could be useful but not foundational. Right?
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