[libria]

> Feature-for-feature comparisons to more accessible libraries (jQuery+plugins) are unconvincing.

The attractive part of Closure was that it had extremely robust, unit-tested counterparts to jQuery's plugins and the reliability of it was never in question. For a while, their URL parser was superior to anything in the jQuery ecosystem. By contrast, jQuery plugins have many different authors with widely variant degrees of quality.

Part of the verbosity is due to its type system, but it was one of the few client-side tools I used where my code had a high chance of running well once I satisfied the compiler. I notice React's Flow and TypeScript are realizing the benefits of better type checking which Closure has had for ages.