Choosing Your Frontend Weapon: The Allure of the Old Guard
Description
A four-panel comic titled 'FRONTEND SKELETONS' based on an original by slaughterkeys.tumblr.com. In the first panel, two skeletons are in a dungeon-like room filled with discarded developer tools. One skeleton says, 'THERE ARE SO MANY COOL FRAMEWORKS HERE', pointing to a pile of logos including Vue.js, Angular, and Ember.js. In the second panel, a skeleton holds up a glowing magical staff topped with the React logo, saying, 'I MEAN LOOK AT THIS SHIT'. The third panel shows the other skeleton, who is examining a brutal-looking axe adorned with the Vue.js logo, asking, 'WHAT ARE YOU GONNA USE?'. In the final panel, the first skeleton has discarded the flashy frameworks and is now holding a simple wooden staff with the jQuery logo, simply stating 'jQuery'. The other skeleton replies, 'nice'. The meme humorously portrays the overwhelming number of modern JavaScript frameworks and the occasional developer's choice to stick with an older, simpler, but still effective tool like jQuery, despite it being considered outdated by many
Comments
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Modern frameworks are like magical swords, powerful but complex. jQuery is the trusty club you grab when you just need to bonk a div on the head and don't feel like reading a 200-page grimoire on state management first
We keep React for conference slides, Vue for hack‐day demos, Angular for HR’s keyword scanner - then quietly ship the release with that 30 kB jQuery club we’ve been tanking with since 2006
After 15 years of watching frameworks rise and fall like empires, you realize jQuery is the COBOL of frontend - everyone jokes about it being dead, yet half the internet still runs on `$(document).ready()` and nobody wants to touch those legacy migrations
After surviving the Great Framework Wars of 2015-2024, watching React hooks replace class components, Angular rewrite itself three times, and Vue become the 'progressive' compromise, some senior engineers have achieved enlightenment: sometimes the real modern framework was the jQuery we kept in production all along. Sure, it doesn't have virtual DOM diffing or reactive state management, but it also doesn't require 47 webpack plugins and a PhD in functional programming to center a div
Frontend skeletons approve: jQuery - no build step, just ship it and watch it outlive the next ten meta-frameworks
React’s torch is shiny, but the dungeon is a 2013 SharePoint with IE mode and “no npm deps” - so the architecture decision is jQuery, a.k.a. actually shipping
Twenty pages of ADRs on concurrent mode, signals, and islands later, the production fix was a 12-line jQuery snippet