Re:Stop writing milliseconds and hating JavaScript's setTime...
by debaserab on Sunday May 15, 2011 @01:55AM
(#2549420)
But jQuery is a library, not a programming language. A web developer should not depend on jQuery precisely because it is not available in every javascript environment.
Re:Stop writing milliseconds and hating JavaScript's setTime...
by baddox on Monday May 16, 2011 @02:43AM
(#2551848)
Where does plain old code reusability (which everyone in the software industry agrees is good) end and "libraries" begin? The jQuery library is just a bunch of open source JavaScript code. If you can distribute your own JavaScript code with your web creations, then you can distribute jQuery, and even if the jQuery team breaks things you can keep using an old version. Are you suggesting it shouldn't be relied upon because someone else wrote it, or are you against code reuse in general?
Re:Stop writing milliseconds and hating JavaScript's setTime...
by stephenr on Monday May 16, 2011 @06:52AM
(#2552157)
No, you can't always distribute jQuery - if a project is already using another library, it's not really acceptable to include jQuery.
Code re-use is great, when it makes sense. Requiring jQuery and a ~250 line script, so you can use "5 minutes" instead of (5 * 60 * 1000) is ridiculous, and any developer who does that would get a bollocking if they reported to me.
Programming is about solving problems, and if someone else has already solved a problem in a generalized and reusable way, at the end of the day you haven't created value by insisting on recreating that solution yourself. Please note that I'm referring to getting things done, specifically in industry; I'm not arguing that also understanding the lower levels is a bad thing. For example, I would love to thoroughly understand x86 assembly, and it would probably make me a better programmer (it couldn't hurt), but that doesn't mean I would refuse to use a high level language.
Being "reliant" on jQuery and its plugins isn't a bad thing if you're a web programmer that will always be able to use those tools. You can always go down another level and call someone "reliant." If you use pure JavaScript, then you're "reliant" on the browser's implementation. If you wrote the browser's JavaScript implementation in C++, you're "reliant" on the C++ compiler. Perhaps by the end of the day you're an x86 assembly expert, but now you're "reliant" on the assembler until you memorize the bit strings of all the hundreds of instruction.