JQuery considered harmful

Front-end development considered harmful. Every moron wants to defecate out the next best frontend framework it's a joke at this point. Front end developers have made a mockery of the industry.

Once it's in there, it's in there. It's like a candle melted into the carpet, you can't just remove it.

This just in: abstractions are slower to process, faster to develop.

It's not like this has been true of high-level programming languages for decades...

Even jQuery's harmfulness has been discussed for years[1][2] as well as that of other front-end frameworks Angular[3].

Just like high-level programming languages, the goal of abstractions is not to achieve better performance, but to enable faster development time with less expertise, which most firms figure translates to more profit in less time.

-----------

[1]: https://jsperf.com/jquery-selectors-vs-native-api [2]: http://james.padolsey.com/general/javascript-abstractions [3]: http://jsperf.com/angular-foreach-vs-native-for-loop

We've started expirementing with using Typescript, and this alone relieves this issue of knowing whether your object is jQuery-wrapped.

But honestly,the $-prefixed variables is so commonplace that I mostly treat it as gospel

jQuery's API is a whole lot easier to use than native APIs. Just take a look at this site: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ the jQuery code is much more concise. This is understandable because jQuery is a middleware built on top of the native API's.

Point is: Unless the native API can address the "saves time and effort" part, people will stick to jQuery (or coffescript or typescript).