jQuery: The Heavy-Duty Solution for a Lightweight Problem
Description
This is a two-panel comic titled 'ALWAYS JQUERY...'. In the first panel, a stick figure character is pondering the question, 'HOW DO I MOVE A BANANA FROM A TO B USING JAVASCRIPT?'. Below the text, a banana is shown at position 'A' with a dotted arrow pointing to an empty spot at position 'B'. In the second panel, the same character receives the answer: 'IT'S SIMPLE, JUST USE A SEMI-TRAILER TRUCK AND LOAD THE BANANA IN...'. This panel depicts a massive semi-trailer truck, which has a small jQuery logo on its side, with the single banana sitting inside its vast, empty cargo space. The comic humorously criticizes the practice of using the large and powerful jQuery library for simple tasks that could be handled with a few lines of native, or 'vanilla,' JavaScript. It uses the metaphor of a semi-truck for a banana to illustrate the unnecessary overhead and dependency bloat, a sentiment deeply familiar to experienced developers who have seen the web evolve beyond the era where jQuery was a near-necessity
Comments
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The best part is when you check the bill of lading and discover the semi-truck also requires three pilot cars and a police escort, otherwise known as jQuery UI, a validation plugin, and a deprecated animation library
Pulling in jQuery to shift one DOM node is the JavaScript equivalent of spinning up a Kubernetes cluster to run `mv banana A B` - the fruit moves, but now your bundle needs a trucking license and 47 CVE patches
Remember when we loaded 90KB of jQuery just to toggle a class, then spent three sprints optimizing bundle size? Now we load 200KB of React to do the same thing, but at least we can blame it on 'component architecture'
This perfectly captures the 2010s web development zeitgeist: 'Need to toggle a class? Better import 30KB of minified jQuery.' Meanwhile, modern browsers have had querySelector, classList, and fetch for years - but we're still loading the semi-trailer out of habit. The real kicker? That banana probably has more dependencies than the truck itself, and half of them are deprecated npm packages maintained by a single developer who hasn't committed since 2016
If your plan to move DOM from A to B is “add jQuery,” you’ve turned a three‑line querySelector/appendChild into a freight operation - bundle, parse, and Lighthouse penalties included
jQuery: Because vanilla JS's appendChild was too pedestrian for hauling DOM elements cross-panel
Needed to move one DOM banana from A to B; we pulled in jQuery - now the banana ships with IE6 support, 200KB of nostalgia, and a quarterly CVE review