Comment by gbalduzzi
17 hours ago
The problem with jQuery is that, being imperative, it quickly becomes complex when you need to handle more than one thing because you need to cover imperatively all cases.
17 hours ago
The problem with jQuery is that, being imperative, it quickly becomes complex when you need to handle more than one thing because you need to cover imperatively all cases.
Yeah, that's the other HN koan about "You probably don't need React if..." But if you are using jquery/vanilla to shove state into your HTML, you probably actually do need something like react.
It's not really about state but dom updates.
Part of me feels the same way, and ~2015 me was full on SPA believer, but nowadays I sigh a little sigh of relief when I land on a site with the aesthetic markers of PHP and jQuery and not whatever Facebook Marketplace is made out of. Not saying I’d personally want to code in either of them, but I appreciate that they work (or fail) predictably, and usually don’t grind my browser tab to a halt. Maybe it’s because sites that used jQuery and survived, survived because they didn’t exceed a very low threshold of complexity.
Facebook is PHP ironically.
It was once upon a time, hence them moving to HHVM to interpret it, but it’s been all but replaced with a PHP spinoff named Hacklang now.
I think in 2026 Facebook is a conglomeration of a bunch of things... Definitely not just PHP anymore.