I Learned Some Things About jQuery Today


Update: Olmo and I have been in contact recently, off public-facing sites, but here’s a public response that he made, and here’s a private one that I gave to him:

Thank you for doing this. I want to, personally, apologize for
everything that I did during the past couple days. It was out of line
– both for myself and in general. I should’ve done a much-more even
tempered response, I got caught up, it turned into a flame – ugh,
sorry again.

I fully accept your apology and will be adding your comment and
modifying my post to give people more details and apologizing
publicly.


Watch first: [Video]

I learned some things about jQuery today…

jQuery Steals Code

In fact, not only do we steal code, but we’re incompetent at it too! Durrrr, let’s swap some variables and pray it works! How does animation work? Who knows! It’s one of the mysteries of the Intertubes! I mean, it’s obvious that we never could’ve completely rewritten a popular animation library back in 2005 because we just “tweaked some variables” and prayed everyday that it would work.

jQuery hates developers, love companies

We love that sweet, sweet, money that corporations send our way. Forget developers. As far as we’re concerned, they can stay in the ditch that we threw them in to drive on the way to moneytown.

jQuery hates prototyped code

I mean really hate. Like, so much so that we wouldn’t even think of contributing to their code bases or invite them to be on a panel with us.

File size is the only thing jQuery considers when adding a feature

It doesn’t matter how useful it is, or what performance benefits we get. It’s file size, over everything else. Carefully balancing facts and weighing advantages is ludicrous and highly overrated.

File size is irrelevant

Making code modular makes file size irrelevant, since you can just pick and choose what you want to use. Nevermind that the sum of the parts is larger, all that matters is that you write code for developers. Developers who don’t care about file size.

jQuery code isn’t modular

I mean, I think the code base would have to be broken into, at MINIMUM, over 250 modules before we even talked.

Ternary Operators!

Seriously, need I say more? Obviously the mark of incompetence.

jQuery claims that it’s the fastest library

Every blog post, there we are, thumping our chests, showing our superiority…. against ourselves!

jQuery has problems with closures

My head, literally, just exploded. I’m dead, lying on the floor. Can someone please put “he had a lot of problems because of the closures” on my tombstone? Thanks! (I wish I was making this up, 16:20, check it out.)

Olmo: You seem immensely proud of your ignorance concerning other libraries but love to speak on authority concerning them. Maybe you should take some time to sit down and actually try to use and work with other libraries, because while you were out bashing and slandering us we were writing rock solid code, sharing, collaborating, and discussing the future of the web.

Let us know when you’re ready to see the Open Web succeed, we’ll be here, getting things done.

Updated: Valerio (head of the Mootools project) has posted a reply on the Mootools blog.

Posted: December 12th, 2007


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