The old guard's loyalty to jQuery over vanilla JavaScript
Description
A two-panel 'Drake' style meme format featuring an elderly woman. In the top panel, she looks displeased and holds up her hand to reject the word 'JavaScript' written in black text. In the bottom panel, she smiles and points approvingly at the word 'JQuery'. A watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is visible in the bottom left corner. This meme humorously captures the historical preference for jQuery over native JavaScript (vanilla JS). For many years, jQuery provided a much simpler and more consistent API for manipulating web pages across different browsers. The joke is relatable to senior developers who remember this era, though it also serves as an ironic statement, as modern JavaScript has largely made jQuery redundant for new projects. The preference shown is now often seen as a sign of being out-of-touch with current frontend development practices
Comments
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Modern JavaScript is like a well-organized toolbox, while jQuery is that one trusty multi-tool you still keep around because you haven't admitted the individual tools are just better now
My muscle memory can type $('#widget') faster than your ESBuild cold start; until that changes, jQuery isn’t the legacy - I am
The real irony is spending 6 months building a React micro-frontend architecture to replace a jQuery app that's been running flawlessly in production for 12 years, only to discover the jQuery version had better Time to Interactive metrics
This meme perfectly captures the cognitive dissonance of developers who still reach for jQuery in 2024, when modern JavaScript has native methods like `querySelectorAll()`, `fetch()`, and the spread operator that make jQuery's abstractions largely obsolete. It's the technical equivalent of insisting on using a flip phone because you've memorized where all the buttons are - sure, it works, but you're adding 30KB of nostalgia to your bundle size and missing out on tree-shaking, better performance, and the fact that IE11 is finally dead. The irony is that jQuery was revolutionary for solving browser inconsistencies in 2006, but clinging to it now is like refusing to learn that the DOM API grew up and doesn't need a chaperone anymore
jQuery: the shim that let us chain blissfully while browsers played catch-up a decade later
"No JavaScript, we use jQuery" - the battle cry of legacy frontends with IE8 trauma, a 7k-line $(document).ready, and three plugins fighting over window.$
Nothing beats time-to-prod like a CDN script tag: jQuery, the cross-browser abstraction that outlived three SPAs and two CTOs