JavaScript = JQuery
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
JavaScript was and still is one of those coding languages that always seemed a little too difficult to get your head around and do anything truly useful with it. Times have changed and with the availability of numerous JavaScript frameworks the one time chore of adding interactivity to your website has been made easier, even exciting.
After skirting around a few frameworks in the early days I eventually made the conscious decision to stick with JQuery. Rather than use the first framework that came up when searching for a specific technique I decided to stick with one and hope to learn this. Usually I’d prefer to learn JavaScript itself but other than learning some of the basics it was just too much to cope with.
I’m not positive over what swayed my decision to choose JQuery but I’m glad I did as in my view it’s the most widely adopted which has led to a higher number of tutorials and plugins becoming available as well as a much larger community. Parallels can be made between JQuery and WordPress as having become the dominant forces in their respective markets.
I’m positive many people like myself now use JQuery and know little to no standard JavaScript, so could it be the case that in the future JavaScript as a coding language will become near obsolete serving a purpose only as the base for JQuery, where this becomes the de-facto language for creating dynamic websites.
I’m sure those who create and use the other frameworks such as Prototype and Mootools would wish to challenge this idea. Whether or not JQuery will be universally adopted I think that JavaScript will soon die off as a language that web developers learn, replaced instead with JQuery or possibly another framework.