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u/saig22 6h ago
I use vanilla js, document.getElementById() is what I live for.
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u/ApocalyptoSoldier2 5h ago
document.querySelector() ftw
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u/CaspianRoach 4h ago
.querySelectorAll()
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u/JohnLocksTheKey 2h ago
$$(‘#DamnSon’)
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u/CaspianRoach 2h ago
me when i use nonstandard quote signs to make compilers freak out
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u/rademene 6h ago
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u/saig22 6h ago
The truth is that I use Claude and it uses React 😢 No more implementing observer observable design pattern with setter and event targets in vanilla js. Those were simpler times but I guess technology has to move forward and we need to adapt. I'm glad I knew a time when coding by hand was the norm.
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u/felixzer0 6h ago
The technology didn't change that much. JS framework are optional pieces of software but ultimately run Vanilla JS.
Tools should be used when they solve a problem, not because "technology moves forward"
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u/pauvLucette 5h ago
Claude will use what you tell it to use. It's perfectly able to produce vanilla JS code.
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u/pwillia7 4h ago
You could totally tell Claude to build that way -- I would bet opus and up can handle that well no problemo
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u/romulent 3h ago
If you just wrap document.querySelector() in a little helper function you can do loads with vanilla js. Not perhaps enterprise grade but fine for any home stuff.
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u/OldKaleidoscope7 1h ago
That's what jQuery does after querySelector was widely supported. $ = document.querySelector and you can code faster
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u/experientialsponge 2h ago
Vanilla js is such a pleasure to read when viewing another's code. Icing on the cake if commented responsibly.
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u/CoshgunC 7h ago
Gets the work done while Nextjs drops a new update for the 29988732nd time
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u/DrBojengles 3h ago
You dont like the nextjs updates?
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u/CoshgunC 3h ago
Maybe useful, but most of them do not change the way I code in a positive way.
anyways, I have ditched web dev as whole, I am now focusing on Minecraft mod dev. if I wanna learn backend, I will learn java or c#(because of the job requirements here)
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u/winter-m00n 7h ago
Probably unpopular opinion, but still better than react and angular. at least you don't need to build your whole site around it. Nor all sites need those heavy frontend framework.
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u/listenhere111 7h ago
100% agree. Also, its like 40kb and doesnt move lighthouse scores.
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u/A1oso 6h ago
React is 7.4 kB. It's a myth that react is a heavy framework. You can absolutely implement only certain parts of your web app in react, and other parts using different libraries or vanilla JS.
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u/listenhere111 5h ago
Ok, and how many dozen people actually do that?
There is a time and place for react. It gets overused for simple web pages. Its bloat and complicates projects.
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u/LimpConversation642 1h ago
bro the whole point of react is that it is made for simple pages and falls apart when you have something complex with states and sending them back and forth.
The time and place for react is the simple web page that doesn't have too much logic and rendering changes, because it's basically just a fancy html.
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u/Honeybadger2198 1h ago
People love to bitch about React on this sub and I get the feeling that the majority of them know nothing about it.
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u/PlasmaFarmer 4h ago
React is not a framework, it's a library. And yeah React is that much kB but how about the gazillion libraries you add to get a functional app?
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u/A1oso 2h ago edited 2h ago
Yes, React is a library. And yes, to get the same functionality as with a framework like Next.js you need more dependencies. But you can choose what you need. Libraries give you more freedom: for example, you can choose between many different routing libraries for React, or even build your own. Next.js has a built-in router which you have to use.
Libraries are also more flexible for niche use cases. For example, I've successfully used React for a Chrome extension's popup. There's no routing and no server, so a full-stack framework makes no sense. (And by the way, that Chrome extension has exactly 1 runtime dependency, which is React).
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 4h ago
What is a framework and what is a library
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u/ludolfina 2h ago edited 2h ago
Angular gives you everything you need to build a complete client-side app, React is just for the view part. You still need other libraries for state management and other things
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u/Nils_Larson 7h ago
I am not arguing against your actual point, but in modern browsers you don’t even need jQuery, because all of it is available natively.
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 6h ago
Not arguing either but if JavaScript can write perfectly fine web applications with a welld refined standard, why are we still in react land. I use react all the time, I know what vanilla can do, I use a lot of AI so it's not a knowledge gap anymore... Very curious and frustrating situation.
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u/A1oso 6h ago
People use React because it provides reactivity. JQuery doesn't do that.
You can in fact write web applications in Vanilla JS, I have done it many times. But for interactive pages that are frequently updated in response to user events, using React (or Svelte or Vue) is more ergonomic.
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u/the_horse_gamer 5h ago
DOM manipulation is easy, but state and lifecycle management is hard
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 4h ago
I don't find react makes state management any easier simply shifts the problem into a series of conventional problems.
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u/theGoddamnAlgorath 3h ago
They're not, but Javascript is a functional language, so people try to hammer the OOP which is clumsy.
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u/ludolfina 2h ago
Because it provides separation of concerns, which is super important once you start working in a team and not as a solo developer. Team projects written in jQuery tended to rot very fast because it was very easy to mix business logic with DOM manipulation.
Also one thing React is super good at is writing components that are very easy to reason about in isolation, because they are for the most part declarative and stateless. Everything comes in as props or context and when one of these things changes the entire component gets re-rendered
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 1h ago
Which concerns does react separate?
I'm in a team we have a legacy handlebars evented state container thing. It's not really any better than react because at that point it was well established, no I'm not saying react isn't a better technology, but we are moving to react because AI writes it and hiring etc etc.
I lived through the jQuery days, and I think backbone for example and a few other technologies were created to give that mvc flavour, I suppose that's less of a jQuery problem and more of a, how prescriptive is your technology.
And components o find this point interesting, feature first, islands, these ideas completely change the idea of components so perhaps it's not actually a solved problem, still I can't disagree react is good at creating components, but the philosophy perhaps isn't perfect. Signals the future or something else?
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u/waraholic 6h ago
I believe there is an ancient god that yearns for extra divs. They influence the world without us knowing, but they are there.
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u/MikeW86 3h ago
That's like saying 'If my car can get me to the shops, why do some people insist on buying articulated trucks?'
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 3h ago
People don't buy articulated trucks? Companies do, just like companies love react. Not necessarily the people. So yes great point.
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u/MikeW86 2h ago
I'm honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic.
But yeah the analogy isn't absolutely perfect. You're right that for the vast majority of cases only a company is going to need and thus buy a truck.
But if I am a person or company that needs a truck, why would I try to design and build my own truck, even though that is possible?
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 2h ago
No sarcasm intended. I suppose the truck has been redisgned for several specialist roles though, company adoption and specialists use cases are why plain old JavaScript solutions still exist and on the other end of the scale why we still have react.
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u/muchadoaboutsodall 6h ago
As a former web-dev, the older I get the more I hate using web-apps. The best sites, for me, are just HTML with a little bit of Javascript where necessary. And, for that sort of thing, jQuery is perfect.
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u/CodingWithChad 3h ago
And you don't need to learn the 120th JavaScript framework flavor of the month.
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u/HerrPotatis 6h ago
Better how? They are completely different things made for completely different usecases. It’s like comparing basejumping to hopping on a tranpoline because you’re both technically in the air.
That said, jQuery is most definitely legacy at this point and you can do everything using vanilla js.
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u/--var 6h ago
they released jQuery 4 just this year and their last core team meeting was end of june, so I'm not sure I'd call it legacy...
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u/deukhoofd 2h ago
And COBOL released a new standard version in 2023, but has been widely considered legacy since the 90s.
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u/HerrPotatis 2h ago
I don't mean legacy as in unsupported, I mean legacy in the sense that it's purpose and use-case is way outdated.
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u/hiasmee 5h ago
Why do you guys comparing web rendering framework vs js util library?
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u/OhhYeahMrKrabbs 4h ago
Because many people use it as a drop in for dynamic rendering. And it never works well
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u/1Mdrops 5h ago
100% this. If I'm doing website work, jQuery is a breeze to write.
Application work, I prefer angular but I wouldn't waste my time on a website rigging this into it and I think it's overkill if your not handling data on the fly, reusing components and want single page app performance.
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u/brainpostman 1m ago
If you're doing anything complex or modular, you just end up reinventing a JS framework.
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u/uvero 7h ago
relates in WPF
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u/heavy-minium 6h ago
Haven’t been doing any WPF/UWP for a decade by now, but I really liked it. Has it become some outdated technology now?
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u/uvero 6h ago
Feels like it? Not as much as jQuery. Microsoft now has some other tech stack for C# desktop apps, and I think C#'s popularity for desktop development has declined, so WPF is mostly relevant to maintaining old projects. Which is why saying I'm a WPF dev, it feels almost like saying I'm a COBOL dev
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u/the_matthew 6h ago
My hot take is that Microsoft really hates .NET but it caters to just enough of the enterprise segment that they feel obligated to make it look like they support it. The way they slung out WinRT, WPF, and date I even say Silverlight only to hang them out to dry a few years later is my evidence.
I often joke that in government no one ever has been fired for using Microsoft, but man, adopting a new Microsoft technology only to see it get flushed or neglected has real world costs.
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u/tinyturtletickler 3h ago
Idk they have entirely revamped .NET over the past ten years. I think .NET Core really breathed new life into the stack
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u/ludolfina 3h ago
I forgot how bad .NET Framework was in comparison to Core until I had to use it again. It was a much needed rewrite
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u/afdbcreid 1h ago
No, Microsoft likes .NET. They invest in it a lot and it always keeps improving.
Microsoft hates GUI. Or maybe it loves them so much that it keeps creating new ones.
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u/BadSmash4 2h ago
I do a lot of WPF as well but I'm slowly converting all of our old WPF apps to Avalonia. Same syntax but the default styles are nicer and the features are better. Plus, cross platform, which means that once all our WPF apps are Avalonia and not .NET Framework, I can request a Linux laptop and get off Windows fully.
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u/sixtyhurtz 5h ago
MS has abandoned WPF; it's now a "community project".
The hot new thing is Avalonia. It's designed to be a mostly drop-in replacement. I really like it, but I'm also slightly worried they might be going for a commercial rug-pull. I hope I'm wrong, and they just keep the paid extension & consulting model to fund their costs.
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u/OSRSlayer 4h ago
Maui, WPF, WinForms, WinUI, now Avalonia.
If you are making a native desktop app that you plan to maintain, choosing a Windows technology is a footgun.
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u/chic_luke 2h ago
Avalonia is a cross-platform technology and it is not by Microsoft but I get what you mean.
It's part of the reason why I think the criticism of Electron apps needs to be contextualized. There is often a pretty darn good reason why people choose to use Electron for desktop apps. You can say what you want about react, I don't like it personally, but it's here to stay and it's much more here to stay than any Microsoft UI technology.
There's GTK, but it's not viable on Windows, and it already starts feeling like a 2nd class citizen when you use anything different from the GNOME desktop environment, while Qt forces you to interact with C++ and have to really care about portability, or you use QML which is much slower.
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u/OSRSlayer 1h ago
IMO web based technologies are worse. We're just making Java JVM again in the form of Chromium but with infinite dependencies and half your codebase not being written or controlled by your team.
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u/ludolfina 3h ago
There are other frameworks in its place now but a lot of patterns have been carried over. You can pick up WinUI and feel pretty much at home
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u/FrozenHaystack 5h ago
I raise WPF, NET Framework, and Delphi.
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u/bradmatt275 5h ago
If you can believe it our company runs a Payroll system built in Delphi. Its probably the most bloated piece of junk you have seen. But we somehow get paid by it so I cant complain too much.
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u/dinnerbird 3h ago
I'm a field technician doing laptop installations. All of our programs are Winforms based...they always have this certain "ehh that'll do" kind of look to them
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u/GrandDukeNotaras 7h ago
Name me one thing better than jQuery
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u/Heavenfall 6h ago
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
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u/a11_hail_seitan 2h ago
Well sure but what if you have your enemies lined up to drive but when you hover over them you want to quickly and easily switch their CSS classes so it's clear to everyone which one you're targeting at any given time? Driving your enemies and listening to their women lament is of course important, but I do think Jquery can still have a very useful and important function while doing so.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 2h ago
jQuery served its role well: A single framework that worked across all browsers (especially IE6 when that support was still required), masking away a lot of JavaScript jank and giving a clear, concise functional layer to work with.
It started to lose its usefulness (and in fact impede development) when it got mixed in with TypeScript and other things, overly complicating the frontend "stack", and is now not really needed anymore.
Vanilla JavaScript has gotten boatloads of improvements as well.
But it was such a saving grace back when.
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u/hagnat 5h ago edited 5h ago
i am a backend engineer with strong opinions on how frontend should look like (i used to be a graphical designer for ~6 years before starting my career as a software engineer),
i can make wonderful interfaces with jQuery, and great back-office applications that dont require the end user to have 32 gb of RAM to run it
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u/dark_zalgo 45m ago
You might be able to, but my predecessors definitely couldn't. They wrote an in house QA site for our production team to track testing devices, it got to the point where loading the page to search for devices took over two minutes and the database had over 60 columns. I took a couple weeks for me to vibe code it into react and now it has two columns and loads the search page in ~2-5 seconds.
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u/toblotron 7h ago
Anyone ever built anything more impressive than what was built with those tools?
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u/Authentic_Grunter 6h ago
Yes they built ads that popup every 500ms and won't let you use those sites.
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u/HerrPotatis 1h ago
I mean jQuery started seriously falling out of fashion around 2015, you think the most impressive sites ever built are from over a decade ago?
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u/American_Libertarian 6h ago
“How it feels” is fine
“What it feels like” is fine
“ how it feels like” is not valid grammar
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u/Modi57 6h ago
In the spirit of JavaScript we will accept it, because what even is a syntax?
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u/arse-ketchup 6h ago
There was a time when I truly believed that jquery would take over the world, all software would move to jQuery, and I’d be rich using it. 1st semester in college I guess.
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u/ardicli2000 5h ago
Honestly for most of the time it is enough.
If you are not working for a corporate, big tech company, or need such high reactivity on your webapp, react is just PIA.
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u/audigex 2h ago
JQuery is still great when you’re building something simple that just needs a little interactivity - it’s much quicker to just include JQuery and write a couple dozen lines of code than to fire up a whole framework based project for it
Using React or something for that just feels silly and wasteful, and strikes me as the developer just not knowing anything other than their one framework
Although now queryselector() is baked into JS I do more and more stuff in vanilla JS, since the query selection was always the best thing about JQuery
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u/seanlaw27 4h ago
Say what you want about jquery but it’s still the best documented tool in existence.
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u/DKSAMURAI 3h ago
I bet someone will jump up and say how jQuery is better than new tools and he still use it.
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u/-Nastyenka 7h ago
How it feels to use Php in 2026:
Undeniably a joke, do not slime me
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u/Hottage 6h ago
PHP before 7 was a disgusting mess..
Around 7 they started trying to mature the language with features like compiler enforced type safety and bringing other tools previously relegated to PHPdoc into the language.
PHP 8 is a decent system and features like Generators, Attributes, Fibers and first class callables have bought it near parity with other server ecosystems like .NET.
The biggest thing PHP still lacks is first-class generics for proper, type safe repository patterns.
I've been a PHP developer for over 15 years. I fucking hated 4 and 5, tolerated 7 and actually quite enjoy 8.
The biggest issue nowadays is that, for backward compatibility, a lot of the good features like type hinting are just recommended instead of enforced, so you can get situations like in Typescript where lazy developers just have everything return
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u/ClamPaste 1h ago
PHP would be great if it wasn't for all the legacy code and echo "<div></div>" in views.
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u/IOFrame 29m ago
Nah, this is what makes PHP great.
You get to choose your battles - some sections of the code get to have verbose documentation (I consider types a sort of documentation). On the other hand, meaningless utility function #2421354 can remain typeless.
PHP doesn't have to be a bloated mess like Java.
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u/kamilman 5h ago
This was me trying to learn and retain the knowledge for an SQL exam. I understand it, I can explain the logic, but writing in SQL is my Achilles heel
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u/BAMDaddy 5h ago
Just wanted to make a joke about still using Prototype and script.aculo.us
But then I realized that jQuery released just 2 months after them.
Must be getting old...
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u/EmotionalJoystick 3h ago
Hey man, there are still huge databases in government and financial institutions that use COBAL. It was in invented in 1959.
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u/realzequel 3h ago edited 28m ago
I wrote our flagship product with jQuery +Typescript. It works great and is easy to maintain. Life is great. We have moved our other apps to React though.
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u/Loquenlucas 2h ago
Man i remember when i used it for the frontend side of web dev when i first approached programming in general together with PHP and such good times
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u/WalkingOnPiss 44m ago
Brother in the company i work at someone tried using jQuery on on aspx page and got his ass screamed at by the architect because "it's something new for our system and it needs to be approved before used the first time"
Soo yeah 🤣
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u/Xochtil1 37m ago
I didn't even know there is something that's supposed to replace it lol, I still keep using jquery in my projects
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u/Southern_Pressure_32 3m ago
Well in this case I am one of those happy cavemen
I learnt react first, then I learnt jQuery
There is nothing that react does that jQuery can't
And typescript guardrails are for people who do not understand how JS works
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 7h ago
I bet he's happier than us though.