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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

> jQuery has had pretty significant traction for 4 or so years now.

One could probably assume you already know it. Right? =)

> Minifying JavaScript and CSS files isn't new, nor are REST and HTML5.

Being new and being widely practiced are two different things. Also, REST is something people still struggle with today, because they assumed they knew it because it's deceptively easy. And HTML5? Really? It takes just 10 seconds to scroll through the thread here and see how just because HTML5 is more than 6 months old doesn't mean everyone sees it as ready.

> but it looks like he's still just catching up with where the rest of us were years ago

The rest of who specifically? Not HN'ers, that's for sure. Not web developers. Who, specifically?

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I'm going based on the hundreds of web developers I've interviewed over the past few years. These include people with no formal training, through to people with a decade or more of experience.

While I don't specifically ask for experience with jQuery in job postings, there have only been a small handful of those candidates who have never used it. But even they have often just focused on using YUI, MooTools, Dojo, or some other similar framework instead. The "changing times" the article author talks about happened years ago when it comes to these frameworks.

The same goes for HTML5, minifying, REST, and basically everything else he listed. These concepts are common knowledge these days, and basically everyone in the field that I've deal with has been aware of them, and in most cases has actively used them.

I really don't know what to say to you, if you actually are a web developer and you found many of those concepts to be new. A lot of what the article author lists are pretty well-established and widely-used. "Changing times" doesn't really apply at all well after the change has happened.

The author explicitly called out .NET developers (" and I see a lot of web developers still lagging behind especially in the .NET world.") So do I.

A trip to my local .net user group last month had presenter going over ASP.NET MVC v4 and some of the reactions and comments were... hard to believe. I'm not saying all .NET devs are behind the times, but there seems to be a disproportionate amount of them, based on my own anecdotal info from attendance at various conferences and user groups over the last couple years.

We get sucked in to the bubble of HN, and the majority of people we interact with on various boards/forums/etc are indeed aware of these technologies, but they do not (yet?) represent the majority of developers.

Agreed. The problem always seems more pronounced when it comes .Net. In my own observation, it seems to be a culture/mindset that gets adopted, and I have to say, I feel it's largely driven by Microsoft.

This whole idea of developing everything yourself, not paying as much attention to subtleties in UI and so on. If you notice most .Net blogs, they're mostly behind the times when it comes to this stuff.

It's like when Ruby on Rails came out, there seemed to be this notion that because something was developed in Ruby, that was the reason why it was "pretty", yet it just happened a culture driven by 37Signals and so the result was that a large portion of Ruby work was decent looking.

In the same vain, I feel Microsoft has set a particular culture in motion when it comes .Net.

Disclaimer: I realise these are generalisations and i may have a skewed view, but these have been my observations for the last several years.

Thank you for answering this for me. Even the trigger for this post was a series of interviews I did for .NET web developers in the last few weeks.

The number of devs I hear complaining about "but but but... I want my webforms!" when confronted with "use a client-side JS tool with REST/AJAX/etc" is staggering. How do they think the rest of the world works?

Adopting these 'new fangled' approaches will increase their ability to move between worlds - perhaps even leaving the .NET compound from time to time. And perhaps more importantly, it will make it easier for people already skilled in front-end JS to contribute more effectively on otherwise-.NET-only teams.

You will almost never find top-notch JS talent (freelance or full-time) who also know how to interop with webforms and older ASP.NET tech. Widen the pool, by changing your practices, and you'll be able to compete more effectively.

agree wholeheartedly about HTML5. Its a broad API with lots of loose parts, and frankly its not ready in the sense that I can take the specs, program an app in HTML5 and be confident that its gonna work. I'm pretty confident in saying no browser supports HTML5 100% - though I'd be happy if someone could prove me wrong :)

And it won't be ready, ever. It is like building the skyscraper on the swamp without proper foundation, or trying to convert your truck to a race car. HTML was born and evolved around hyperlinked content. Using it for apps was an afterthought and it shows and there is no escape from that. You cannot start from scratch and you cannot keep pilling on without breaking the thing. That's why I don't subscribe to the optimism of those claiming that HTML will soon win everything. Really, just try to implement anything moderately complex in web technologies, and then the same thing using any of the native sdk's and compare the level of pain.

>One could probably assume you already know it. Right? =)

There are actually web developers who don't know jQuery?

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