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Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

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Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#261

Post by bcrosby95 »

ianleeclark wrote: post #235
linkdd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's so wrong about sprinkling some jquery on a static website (generated with hugo or jekyll)? On https://kubirds.com I use: jQuery appear: https://plugins.jquery.com/appear/ jQuery fancybox: https://fancyapps.com/docs/ui/fancybox/ Do not put jQuery to the trash yet, it still have a long life ahead.

> what's so wrong about sprinkling some jquery on a static website You're talking past one another. He's speaking in the context of AAA games, and the equivalent of that in the webdev world is a highly interactive application.

I don't see anyone saying to use jQuery for highly interactive applications. If that is the comparison, its not talking past eachother, the original comment is a strawman.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#262

Post by bob1029 »

The extra verbosity of vanilla JS never really bothered me.

I currently work with B2B applications in a sensitive banking context, so any time I can feasibly remove a 3rd party dependency it's almost certainly getting removed.

The extra LOC and time overhead is more than worth it for us. We get dinged on older products which do use jquery all the time by our customers who insist on using other 3rd party security scareware to light up random parts of their infra. I can't use 'but its elegant' or other technical handwavey bullshit as an excuse when the Chief Security Officer of Bank of America shoots me an email, even if there is zero chance the detected "vulnerability" would actually pose any risk in that particular context of use. Certainly, we could spend the time & energy fighting for exceptions, but its way easier to write a few extra lines of JS.

Don't forget the performance angle either. If you are doing a lot of element selection in a hot loop, document.getElementById can be orders of magnitude faster than the jQuery alternatives.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#263

Post by jenscow »

account-5 wrote: post #227

I'm new to web-dev. Having read the vast majority of comments it seems some people think jQuery is unnecessary/obsolete. Others say it's API is better, more concise, more flexible, etc. As a newbie I decided to learn vanilla JS as I was too confused with the state of the various frameworks; I mean what one would you choose to start with? That said I'm interested in what jQuery can do that vanilla JS can't.

> That said I'm interested in what jQuery can do that vanilla JS can't.

jQuery is written in JS, so jQuery can't do what JS can't.

The main reason for using jQuery, as you say, is a cleaner API for DOM manipulation...

    $(".something").parent().append($("").text("click me").click(fn));
If you know nothing about jQuery, you can guess what that does. Of course, you can do it in vanilla JS too. However it's a little harder to write and (more importantly) read.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#264

Post by Beltalowda »

reggieband wrote: post #137

When I first started programming I was pretty lucky to get a job at a games company. My first lead was a veteran who had shipped a lot of AAA titles and he loved his war stories. He was personally interested in performance and he would often cite hardware timings for specific cpu instructions. One story he told a couple of times was about some grey beard who was before his time. The grey beard was once a legend in th…

> I think of this story whenever I see jQuery popup on Hacker News. There is always a strong contingent of devs who swear by this library. But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. At one time jQuery allowed them to be the hero and "Get Things Done" faster than their competition. But times have changed.

Whenever I want to use "vanilla JS" I use jQuery, because I find the DOM and various other JS APIs quite annoying to work with and jQuery makes things a lot smoother. There are some other, slightly smaller, libraries too, but they offer little advantages, are often unmaintained, and many people at least kind-of knows jQuery.

Bombastic absolute statements about "greybeards" being "out of touch" etc. is basically why I tend to avoid the JavaScript frontend community by the way, and also why I moved towards backend rather than frontend. I'm too old to deal with people who think there is One True Way™ to do things and that everyone who disagrees is a blubbering idiot (not that FE JS have a monopoly on this by any means, but it's far more common there).

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#265

Post by ianleeclark »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #261
ianleeclark wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's so wrong about sprinkling some jquery on a static website You're talking past one another. He's speaking in the context of AAA games, and the equivalent of that in the webdev world is a highly interactive application.

I don't see anyone saying to use jQuery for highly interactive applications. If that is the comparison, its not talking past eachother, the original comment is a strawman.

> I don't see anyone saying to use jQuery for highly interactive applications.

I don't know what to tell you. The first sentence in my comment was a quote and the rest of the comment was responding to say how that quote was misunderstanding the OP.

I never said anyone specifically said to do that, but that, in the metaphor that the OP made, a static website isn't an accurate comparison to a AAA game.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#266

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

reggieband wrote: post #137

When I first started programming I was pretty lucky to get a job at a games company. My first lead was a veteran who had shipped a lot of AAA titles and he loved his war stories. He was personally interested in performance and he would often cite hardware timings for specific cpu instructions. One story he told a couple of times was about some grey beard who was before his time. The grey beard was once a legend in th…

I fall in a different camp. If somebody proposes to use a brand new hot technology in a project that is planned to exist more than a few weeks, I tend to politely stop them in their tracks and use a stable reputable solution proven by time.

You see, new hot technology is always replaced by another newer hot technology, and after hotness wanes, projects often become a abandoned and unmaintained.

Extra this if the proposed hot new tech comes from Google. In this case person pushing it should not only be stopped, but also slapped hard, to help come back to senses.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#267

Post by squiffsquiff »

judge2020 wrote: post #255
dlandis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age…

It was just a reference to the person in the story, not an allusion to "because he was old he didn't try to update his knowledge/continue learning".

So why describe him as a "greybeard" then? It are you claiming to have met many younger and/or female 'greybeards'?

If your answer is that 'it's just part of the story'. Well that's precisely the complaint.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#268

Post by Beltalowda »

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #56
zendaven wrote: post #44

I still use jQuery for frontend JavaScript when I can. It's so much more efficient than native JavaScript. I can't imagine anyone prefers to write document.getElementById('element').style.display = 'none' rather than $('#element').hide();

When you are dealing with less than 5 "interactive things", jQuery is awesome... beyond that it might be better to consider a front-end framework. Jr devs have the tendency then to discard jquery because "is old" not because it isn't working anymore.

I think it's not so bad if you organize things reasonably well and minimize "lemme just modify the DOM a wee bit here" hacks. jQuery was popular at a time when "cowboy programming" was very common, leading to a lot of really bad/difficult jQuery apps; but that wasn't strictly jQuery's fault, as such.

That said, front-end frameworks can of course be a better choice for many things, even if it's just because it provides this kind of organisation by default making it easier for the, ehm, less organized devs.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#269

Post by namdnay »

dlandis wrote: post #234
reggieband wrote: post #137

When I first started programming I was pretty lucky to get a job at a games company. My first lead was a veteran who had shipped a lot of AAA titles and he loved his war stories. He was personally interested in performance and he would often cite hardware timings for specific cpu instructions. One story he told a couple of times was about some grey beard who was before his time. The grey beard was once a legend in th…

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age…

Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech?

What I have seen is awkward situations where you have two developers of roughly equal competence. One happens to be 45 and the other 28. Fine, nobody would care about that. Except that due to automatic annual raises, job switches, seniority bumps etc, the 45 year old developer is paid twice as much as the junior.

The rational response to this would be to say to align the two salaries (probably somewhere in the middle), but obviously the older one is never going to accept that - we all expect our salaries to "ratchet" upwards. So we end up with the irrational response, which is to sideline/kick-out the old expensive developer

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