[bstrom]

Lots of blanket statements in this article. He asserts there is a 'proper' order to learning JavaScript but makes no demonstration of that assertion. For me, jQuery was a gateway that hid much of the incidental complexity of working with a byzantine API (the dom). That was incredibly useful. If every beginner started with trying to understand the DOM, they'd probably be scared off (and rightly so).

[icantthinkofone]

What you call Byzantine, I call normal. Some things are harder to learn than others but you can't throw your hands up in the air and let someone else (jQuery) do the simple things for you.

Working with the DOM is what we programmers do. I've never seen so many people complain so much about programming than those who use jQuery.

[bstrom]

The DOM strikes as being composed of layers of incidental complexity that get in the way of the actual problem you're trying to solve. jQuery, or abstractions like it, allow us to compose more elegant and semantically meaningful solutions to problems. If writing boilerplate is interesting for some reason, be it for performance reasons perhaps, then by all means. I find it a bit tedious and appreciate tools that allow me to focus on the problems at hand, rather than obscure browser differences and internal API implementation inconsistencies.