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Comment by maxpupmax | Hacker News Reader

So this is neat and all, and I'm all about learning more about whatever... but what does it mean to learn the architecture? It's not stated in the article where this is useful to me personally (in terms of experience), and I assume for others like myself. What does it mean to write something in javascript with "module libraries" only? That doesn't mean anything to me.

Does anyone have specific recommendations on how to pursue what the author suggests?

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Javascript does not have built-in support for modules, so he is using a library to have module support.

An anti-architecture (in the article's sense I think) might be people who just know jquery but do not know javascript or how the DOM, the browser api, etc.. works, some just use jquery for something that can be done with 10-15 lines of JS, but they don't know better, they lack the principles/architecture knowledge to do so.

This is still a little vague. What does it exactly mean to learn architecture?? Should I be reading the source of the framework and understand how all the design patterns fit in?? How well should one know the language to read the source of the framework?

E.g. Learn how frameworks are built and what design patterns they implement. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern could be a good place to start, if only to get ideas on more things to learn about. You don't have to know a language amazingly well to start picking apart a framework, but it might be helpful to be tenacious enough to go look up and play with the programming concepts they're using which you don't yet understand.

The "architecture of open source applications" books are a good read to get an idea of how bigger pieces of software work, but none of it is JS IIRC.

Free online book discussing design patterns using Javascript: http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...

I'll bite and make the argument here about using jQuery for something a decent dev should be able to implement in native JS: consistency and cross-browser support. Most of the time, I'll reach for jQ because it's so widely used that most of the weird edge-cases are ironed out, and I can be fairly confident that it'll work decently well across most modern-ish browsers. I'm sure there are exceptions, but this has been my experience. If a performance issue comes up and a jQ method is the culprit, I'll optimize that little bit. Until then, I'll use $.extend() instead of whipping it up myself, since I usually have more urgent things to do.

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