JQuery is for Noobs

Summary for those in a hurry: "fuck this, fuck that shit, dojo has better i18n and a11y plugins, fuck jquery, The End" The tarantino writing style weakens his argument, IMHO. More scientific arguments and less passion please.

Strictly speaking, it sounds like Dojo is the one that's "for noobs". I mean, all the stuff that "happens" when you use jQuery are rookie mistakes:

  Including multiple libraries/plugins to do the same thing
  Not being ready to handle i18n/l10n
  Not having tests

Point being, if you know what you're doing, these aren't things that are going to blindside you or that you're just going to forget about.

We have apps that have well over the mentioned 5k LoC of JS that even our Ruby programmers have no problem cracking open and working on if needed.

(And for God's sake, just because they're Rails apps doesn't mean they have to depend on Prototype.)

I think this post is neither trolling nor calling on people to blindly switch to Dojo. It is pointing out a thing I see over and over and over again: people choosing jQuery for tasks to which it is simply not suited. Yes, if you know what you're doing you can make it work -- Alex Sexton makes this argument quite well in his post "On 'Rolling Your Own' Large jQuery Apps" (http://alexsexton.com/?p=106).

This post asks developers who blindly choose jQuery, based on its popularity and an often-misguided sense of self-assuredness, a straightforward question:

"Tell me how, exactly, you plan to solve these problems you haven't even thought about yet? If you proceed blindly with jQuery, then by the time you think about them, you will be effed. So, maybe you ought to ponder, for a solitary moment, that there might be things you haven't thought about yet, and consider a toolkit that's thought about JavaScript app development questions for years, rather than a library whose competencies are still and painfully limited to DOM, Ajax, events and effects."

I applaud the people who answer this question competently with jQuery as a base. What I take issue with is the people who aren't willing to consider for a second that, for all its popularity and simplicity, jQuery might not be the right tool for every JavaScript job under the sun.

What's classic mode?

Great article and very funny.

I use JQuery for the simple stuff and Flex/AS3 for RIA. JQuery is pretty cool but I could see how all the plugins help paint you into a corner.

If I did heavy-duty JS development I have no idea what I'd use. I'd probably just spend wy time bitching about no Flex/AS3.