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Comment by kedean | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to be sour, sorry, I'm just pointing out that jQuery didn't win due to some special superiority that it has. It is in no way better than any of the competition that it had in the early days. jQuery works, of course, but it didn't do anything special in terms of functionality or capabilities. It had everything to do with the audience it appealed to early on.

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jQuery's understandability is part of its superiority over MooTools. When I was first looking for a Javascript library years ago, it was better documented than other libraries, it was more readable (particularly method names), and didn't lean towards OOP (I admit I personally hated Java).

MooTools and other libraries might possibly be more powerful if you are developing in Javascript in general, but for web development I primarily care about DOM manipulation, and it was much easier to pick up jQuery than anything else at the time. It's a mistake to think that languages should win out simply based on functionality and capabilities, without taking into account things like ease of use and learning curve.

One thing worth noting: MooTools, Prototype.js and some other libraries were fond of extending built-in object prototypes. jQuery wasn't.

ES7 wanted to introduce an Array#contains method. But due to prototype extension issues like https://esdiscuss.org/topic/having-a-non-enumerable-array-pr... , they had to rename it to Array#includes ...

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