JavaScript frameworks actually exist for two reasons, one, vanilla JavaScript lacks ease of use (does not suck and I don’t care who disagrees) and two, people love over engineering the fuck out of technology. See: technology since the iPhone came out. We have advanced systems around the world spinning up processes to make up for the fact that touch screens are hard to type accurately on.
jQuery got popular because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers weren’t exactly cross compatible. Writing vanilla JS was risky business in that sense.
It also supported AJAX across all major browsers, which meant the website could make API requests without reloading the entire page. It was super revolutionary to press a button and it only changed a part of the page.
Then Angular and React took it a step forward and that’s where we are now.
I am very aware of the progression. But you’re vastly glossing over how much complexity (and feature set) was added after jQuery. If JavaScript sucks, how would you change it? Shitty browsers implementing it poorly in the past (and safari doing so today) doesn’t make it suck.
JavaScript frameworks are invented because pure HTML and CSS suck for dynamically loaded pages, and vanilla JavaScript suck in general.
It’s still Javascript.
Most pages don’t need dynamic loading.
My menus need to be dynamically reloaded!
True
JavaScript frameworks actually exist for two reasons, one, vanilla JavaScript lacks ease of use (does not suck and I don’t care who disagrees) and two, people love over engineering the fuck out of technology. See: technology since the iPhone came out. We have advanced systems around the world spinning up processes to make up for the fact that touch screens are hard to type accurately on.
Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023
jQuery got popular because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers weren’t exactly cross compatible. Writing vanilla JS was risky business in that sense.
It also supported AJAX across all major browsers, which meant the website could make API requests without reloading the entire page. It was super revolutionary to press a button and it only changed a part of the page.
Then Angular and React took it a step forward and that’s where we are now.
I am very aware of the progression. But you’re vastly glossing over how much complexity (and feature set) was added after jQuery. If JavaScript sucks, how would you change it? Shitty browsers implementing it poorly in the past (and safari doing so today) doesn’t make it suck.
Dynamically loading pages suck too.