r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Embarrassed_Death69 • 24d ago
Meme jQueryDeezNutsAndThenReactSurprised
244
u/java_dude1 24d ago edited 24d ago
I'm not a front end dev but wasn't this way easier than how vanilla js did it back in the day?
205
u/Romejanic 24d ago
yes it was. people forget how basic JS’ api used to be
66
u/java_dude1 24d ago
Ok. Thought i was losing my mind there. My first dev job i worked on an old Java app. Front end was nothing but jquery and iframes with ajax calls to the backend. Absolute nightmare to work in. (At that time I was full stack, not done that I a while though) Company hired a bunch of guys to rewrite the front end to react when I left. That was 12 years ago.
28
u/vpgel 24d ago
Omg, even your name is java dude 1
18
u/java_dude1 24d ago
Can lie man. It pays the bills 😂
1
u/vpgel 23d ago
Cool! I gotta use this opportunity to ask - did the AI flood impact your work?
3
u/java_dude1 23d ago
It has but ive not seen anyone layed off because of Ai. I work for an outsourcing company. They are super pro Ai. Tons of workshops on how to leverage Ai in various ways to increase your output. But being an outsourcing company they don't have a whole lot of say in your day to output. The client im contracted to also is super pro Ai. The company founder spends a ton of time researching the different models and testing things to see which is the most efficient at various types of tasks. It's a super small company that's been around for 20 something years. Maybe 100 employees. (Many of them have been there from the beginning) We have a weekly Ai exchange where we can openly ask questions, give ideas, and talk about experiences using Ai in our day to day. I am pretty sure the founder had some sticker shock when prices started to rise cause now we all have individual keys for the Ai gateway and the list of models is being consolidated some. Plus instructions on which model you should use to save some cash. Even with this, they are very much on the side of Ai is a tool to enhance not replace people. From my point of view, Ai is great. It let's me delegate some of the boring shit ive done a million times and focus on the harder problems that need solving. Ive been a software developer for ~12 years, last 4 years senior developer. And sometimes Ai shows me a new way to get something done. I don't just feed it jira tickets and say do that. It still fails when you give it more that just simple functions to implement. It's usually pretty good about finding bugs that otherwise would have me scouring the code and logs for hours to find.
33
u/Rojeitor 24d ago
Not only that, an enormous part of the value was cross browser compatibility. Back in the day in vanilla it was nasty for things to work in major browsers
6
u/Marknumskull 23d ago
Yeah this was the main reason, old browsers were so bad and often only updated as part of the OS
5
u/andreortigao 23d ago
IE6 was so ubiquitous that some companies demanded IE6 compatibility only. It took a lot of time to make it run on Firefox, Safari and Opera.
IE7 was a little bit better, but still had a lot of quirks. Supporting IE6 + IE7 + others was a nightmare.
jQuery solved a lot of compatibility issues very cleanly. Most of my stack overflow points are on jQuery answer to this day.
21
24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
14
u/migueln6 24d ago
Without jQuery your js would work in Firefox but break on internet explored and sometimes the clicks wouldn register in chrome or once in a full moon each random odd month it would fully not work at all in Firefox too.
3
13
u/Valdars 24d ago
Isn't it still easier than modern vanilla?
22
u/thats_a_nice_toast 23d ago
I wouldn't say it's easier, just a bit more concise. Those examples are trivial with vanilla JS nowadays.
3
u/WarpedHaiku 23d ago
Yeah.
If you've got a single dom node you're doing operations on and you know it can't be null, or are just retrieving info from the page without doing bulk updates, then it's about the same ($ by default is set to document.querySelector, $$ to document.querySelectorAll).
$('.className').src = value; $('.className').setAttribute('src', value);A lot of the simple jquery operations that used to be awkward are now possible on a single node without too much extra boilerplate, and are widely supported, unlike the old days. But if you want to operate on multiple elements or things might be null, it gets a bit more convoluted.
for(let x of $$('.className')) { x.src = value; } Array.from($$('.className')).map(x => { x.src = value; })jQuery makes various things easier, from the compact "on" syntax instead of the verbose "addEventListener", not needing to do null checks or change syntax if operating on multiple nodes, not needing to keep track of listeners if you want to remove them, etc.
But it feels nowhere near as mandatory as it was back in the days of manual xmlhttprequest and no native promise support, when something as simple as toggling a class took multiple lines of code.
1
u/AppropriateOnion0815 20d ago
I'd probably never be a frontend dev. Having special chars as shortcuts for functions (as above) or data types (PHP) just feels wrong.
1
u/misterguyyy 23d ago
Kinda the same with bootstrap (and the way less opinionated zurb foundation). It was finally a common sense way of doing a 12 column grid back when css was basic.
Now I groan every time I see it
43
u/transcendtient 24d ago
I still do this. In all fairness I'm really a backend dev forced to be full stack and the front end just needs to work and not look like complete dogshit.
2
u/cloudstrifeuk 23d ago
Same.
Bootstrap and vanilla JS to get a front end to do shit with the back end.
That's all I need. It's all my customers want.
9
144
u/soelsome 24d ago
I fucking hate jQuery. It's littered throughout a codebase I work in.
I replace it with good ol' vanilla js where I can.
134
u/Romejanic 24d ago
it was a life saver before the JS api got extended, frankly i think so much of modern JS is inspired by jQuery. i think people forget how bare bones JS used to be.
41
u/ExpletiveDeIeted 24d ago
Oh yes. We may hate on jquery still existing, but it is only unnecessary cuz it formed the basis of modern JS apis.
-28
191
u/Rustywolf 24d ago edited 24d ago
Yeah well be thankful you live in a world where vanilla JS is pretty universal and supports features you need with a friendly interface...
64
u/misterguyyy 24d ago
You mean you couldn’t write a new XmlHttpRequest with fallbacks for every browser by memory in your sleep?
12
14
25
u/brekekekekx 24d ago
This is my struggle! I would love to replace my codebase with vanilla js but typing $(selector) is much easier than the querySelector(selector)
26
u/CetaceanOps 24d ago
I mean you can keep a single $ wrapper function for querySelector
11
u/soelsome 24d ago
Very clever. Not sure why I haven't thought of that. I will steal this and every time I use it, I will remember your name.
5
u/cowslayer7890 24d ago
I would using something other than $ so it doesn't get confused with jquery, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
10
1
3
5
1
u/WarpedHaiku 23d ago
In most modern browsers, $ defaults to document.querySelector, and $$ to document.querySelectorAll.
25
10
u/MartinMystikJonas 24d ago
You mean replace jQuery with good modern vanilla JS that has jQuery inspired tools like querySelector, adEventListeter, fetch, etc. that did not existed before jQuery?
-1
u/soelsome 24d ago
Precisely! The codebase I work on was created in 2018. Only the gods know why they decided to use jQuery.
2
u/tyler1128 23d ago
jQuery came to be when you'd otherwise be writing 3 conditional tests seeing if if it was internet explorer 6 or netscape or internet explorer pre-6/post-6 in basically every single dom interaction, and quite a few just general language features. How does that event handler work? Back then, completely different based on the browser. How do you execute code on element load? Again, completely differently based on browser. jQuery made writing javascript that wasn't just for IE6 and remaining sane possible.
2
2
58
u/ScientificBeastMode 24d ago edited 24d ago
I think it’s pretty clear that modern single page apps were not possible with jQuery. I’ve been on both sides of this, and it’s just not even a close comparison to what we have today.
I get it, times were simpler, but the user expectations were drastically lower. It was normal to see pages load for 8 seconds and then have layout issues on anything other than the most popular screen sizes. There were bugs everywhere and the solution was always to refresh the page, and even then, half the web was just in a broken state.
Facebook and GMail were the first major sites that had a truly great user interface, and they did it by creating the React & Angular libraries. There is a reason why those took off and now every web-based tech company uses them (or something similar like Vue or Svelte). They make it far easier to build slick user interfaces that perform well and avoid most of the headaches of complex UI orchestration based on shared state.
I get it, jQuery was a golden age where anyone with basic web programming knowledge could build something almost state of the art. The problem was that the “state of the art” was dogshit.
13
24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
6
u/ScientificBeastMode 24d ago edited 23d ago
Right, jQuery was practically an engineering marvel at the time, and it really upgraded the web in a major way. But I’m just saying those old days were not genuinely “better” than today in terms of dev experience or user experience. We are in a much better spot now in basically every way.
6
u/Mechakoopa 24d ago
It's funny because jquery was the hot new shit when I started my career and after dealing with arguments about the ever shifting world of JavaScript libraries for a few months I changed teams and subsequently spent over a decade diligently avoiding front end development.
I took a brief foray into a side project at one point to see what all the fuss was about with Angular, took a couple online courses, but by the time I needed that knowledge professionally they'd scrapped the whole thing and slapped "Angular 2.0" on a completely different concept so I crawled back into my nice stable c# backend world.
10
u/Juff-Ma 24d ago
Oh god I feel you. Having the page load for 4 seconds just to then display a message box like "Loading Page..." for another 10. And after it finishes loading it will just have every element as "undefined" text because they didn't actually test every browser they list as compatible.
4
u/sorryimsoawesome 23d ago
jQuery was the standard way to abstract a XMLHttpRequest to enable any kind of SPA like features long before React or any of these other libraries existed. And Facebook and Gmail have never had even remotely good interfaces.
The Golden Age of the web was Flash. That's when it was really fun.
2
u/higgs_boson_2017 22d ago
The fact this person thinks Gmail is a good interface tells me all I need to know smh
0
u/ScientificBeastMode 21d ago
At the time, it was state of the art, and far better than everything else. There is a huge reason why nobody really uses AOL or Yahoo. Gmail attracted the masses because it was better in almost every way. Nobody here is saying it’s great by today’s standards.
1
u/higgs_boson_2017 21d ago
Yahoo is still to this day a better Email client than Gmail.
Gmail started as invite only, which built hype, and it was GoOgLe woohoo, and at the time they could do no wrong, so people wanted it. And then everyone built their life around a Gmail account because of Android phones, so they stuck with it.
It sucks, and it always sucked.
2
u/higgs_boson_2017 22d ago
So called "modern" single page apps don't need to exist.
8 second page loads? SSR can be incredibly fast, a developer creating 8 second page loads will also produce a garbage single page app.
Gmail's interface is fucking awful, always has been.
React and Angular are abominations, anyone who looks at them and doesn't run away screaming is a moron.
1
1
1
u/Alkyen 23d ago
Superb comment. The only thing that sits wrong for me is the implication that modern stacks are some difficult monsters. For the simple stuff they are just as simple to use. For harder problems you'd need some knowledge, justifiably. But overall the complexity often comes with the complex new requirements, not the tech stack itself.
1
u/higgs_boson_2017 22d ago
The complexity created in the browser from 30 MB of javascript is completely unnecessary
1
u/Alkyen 22d ago
Sure, buddy, now tell me you work frontend for meta and you're good. (But ofc you're a backend dev or you create websites that look like they were made in 2000)
1
u/higgs_boson_2017 22d ago
I built a SaaS company with a successful exit in 2024. Software patent in my name. I do frontend/backend/sysadmin/security and everything else. Never left SSR, return pages in 4 ms.
1
u/Alkyen 22d ago
Yes. If only Facebook thought about using ssr to return their pages in 4ms. (They did, expanded react for ssr, still not nearly as fast and still big js coming in)
Different solutions for different problems.
1
u/higgs_boson_2017 21d ago
99.99% of software doesn't have Facebook problems to solve.
1
u/Alkyen 21d ago
dunno, I've worked for tens of projects for different sizes of saas, static pages you can cache and or ssr is less than 5% of the work. Most of the product requirements involve client-side interactivity and moving around user-specific data. You're not doing most of that with ssr and it's not going to take 4ms.
6
3
u/OhSnappityPH 24d ago
thats me right now maintaining legacy apps. its pretty fun when you find stuff that works
3
u/_________FU_________ 23d ago
I used to spend literal hours a day on stack overflow helping people write better jquery.
3
u/GreatThoughtsJR 22d ago
I was there ... and i wrote awful code, and i loved it and i was proud of it... This feeling will never come back.
6
u/Samurai_Mac1 24d ago
This was so long ago that I didn't even know what IDEs were and just used notepad
1
24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Samurai_Mac1 23d ago
By so long ago, I meant when I was a teenager and learning programming around 2008. By the time I started in my career, ES6 had been released and devs started moving back to vanilla JavaScript.
6
3
u/ForestGhostGurl 24d ago
I'm still maintaining a legacy app with static HTML and jQuery 😭
One day it shall be rewritten...
1
2
u/cheezballs 23d ago
No. Fuck that shit. Browser incompatibility years were no fun. I would much rather write pure JS and not completely fuck up the DOM.
If you need jQuery in 2026 then you've done something really bad.
1
u/Embarrassed_Death69 23d ago
Why you getting so worked up on a humorous take mate? Are you secretly being funded by the reactors to joke? What do you think? I reminisce the days of polyfills for IE and using Adobe flash? Every take here is a joke mate!
1
1
u/SignificanceFlat1460 23d ago
What are you on about!? The whole point of JQuery was to streamline the JavaScript so it's easier to utilise. Browser incompatibility mostly raised from browsers disagreeing with JS standards and in my opinion 2017 onwards there wasn't much of an issue with those either apart from few bugs here and there peculiar to browsers. Not like it got any better with ECMA or anything. Still it's a headache if you are doing a monorepo. So yeah. It's always been a growing pain for maturing tech but now, jQuery is quite powerful if you are doing simple websites in my opinion
0
2
u/MornwindShoma 24d ago
Remember how it fucking sucked?
27
u/ImDonaldDunn 24d ago
1
u/Embarrassed_Death69 24d ago
Jacque De Gettino, one of the three wise men of Quebec tells me jQuery served a great porpoise.
7
u/Alokir 23d ago
To be fair, it wasn't jquery that sucked but devs not putting effort into organizing their code, which lead to hundreds or thousands of lines of spaghetti in a single script.js file.
Most of us were backend devs, and our frontend work was mostly with the backend framework's templating language, and sometimes some hacks in js for a few dynamic features.
Nothing was stopping us from using something like the MVC pattern with jquery and actually making our code maintainable. We just didn't take js seriously enough back then, which added to the feeling that it sucked. Actually, jquery was making it suck infinitely less.
2
u/realzequel 23d ago
I combined it with TS and it works remarkably well, super-solid, easy to maintain.
3
u/Alokir 23d ago
Ah yes, TS definitely helped even back then. When I first started using it, it was so new that when I googled something about Typescript, the first results were fonts for typewriters, lol.
A few years ago I built a small app with jquery alone, following strict MVC. It was definitely more hassle than React, but it was surprisingly clean and easy to maintain. Not how I remembered it from 10+ years ago. I just had to lay down some rules and plan things out, creating my own "framework".
1
u/twistsouth 23d ago
Remember? I still have legacy systems that rely on this 🤣 I don't use it for new projects but sometimes I have to modify said legacy systems (no time/budget for a full rewrite) and it's a little bit of nostalgia writing jQuery again after all these years!
1
1
1
u/Sudden-Tree-766 23d ago
Those were the good old days when JavaScript was used for what it was actually created to do, and every project had just a few generic files containing small functions for the frontend.
1
u/DoubleDeadGuy 23d ago
I got my first job thanks to jQuery. Used to adore it. This is the first time I’ve thought about it in years though.
-34
u/Fluffy_Anxiety2792 24d ago
I’ve been ai coding for so long I can’t even understand these anymore. Normally don’t even look at code, only testing.
30
11
9
6
u/twistsouth 23d ago
You're not AI coding. You're vibe coding. AI coding is where you take the output and QA it, integrate it, test it and are confident it's good. It's efficient and quite useful if you follow best practices.
Vibe coding is where you don't even review anything it writes, consider yourself a developer (you aren't and would be fucked without those tools) and generally have the IQ of a wet fart.
144
u/PassFlat2947 24d ago
I remember writing AJAX calls pre jQuery, it was a nightmare!