#Notes on Javascript Philosophy
We develop simple modules that adhere to the CommonJS spec and FIRST principles.
Our decision to just rely upon vanilla Javascript was born out our desire to be lightweight and performant. This decision has resulted in a better understanding of how to construct applications, address cross browser issues, and performance tune on mobile. I want to stress that we weren't ideologically opposed to using other frameworks or libraries. We just made a decision based on project complexity and skill of the team.
jQuery plays such a prominent role within front-end web development that I wanted to address the pros / cons of using the library separately.
Pros:
- Easy to learn and great documentation.
- Great ecosystem and community support in the form plugins, Stackoverflow.com, and Github.com.
- High level of availability through CDNS enables apps to take advantage of browser cache loading.
- Many other frameworks/libraries are built upon jQuery allowing beginners to leverage their jQuery
knowledge (i.e., Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery UI).
- jQuery plugin support is tremendous allowing teams to quickly add specific functionalities
to their applications.
Cons:
- Obscures the underlying technologies that FEWDS should be learning
(Javascript, DOM events, DOM manipulation).
- Leads to application bloat if not loading off of a CDN (minimum 60KB).
- Requires you to load entire library just to use a single functionality.
- Overuse of jQuery paradigms leads to bad JS architecture
(i.e., Event callback hell; Function call chaining hell).
- Using native DOM methods results in superior performance.
http://ilikekillnerds.com/2015/02/stop-writing-slow-javascript/
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/166273/advantages-of-using-pure-javascript-over-jquery