Is jQuery still relevant in 2022?
This week, I joined Dev creator Ben Halpern, along with guests Diana Le and Tyler Smith, on the DevDiscuss podcast.
We had a nice chat about whether or not jQuery is still relevant in 2022.
My perspective (which probably won’t surprise you) is that jQuery was an amazing tool that “paved the cow paths” for the web we have today. I think modern browser features make it largely irrelevant, but its documentation is fantastic, which makes it a great teaching tool!
My fellow panelists disagreed with me in some really interesting ways.
Tyler mentioned that when he works with a platform like WordPress, he’s already “paying the jQuery tax” whether he personally uses it or not, so he might as well just use it.
Diana talked a bit about the battle-tested tooling they use, which was built around jQuery. Migrating away from that requires more dev time for their clients, and less certainty around how well it will work (at least at first when the code replacing it will be new).
I thought both of those perspectives were really interesting and nuanced, with lots of assumptions and edge cases to unpack.