I’m all about new technology, but just like Steve Jobs had put it, it has to be intuitive. It has to feel comfortable, and easy to learn. This is reference to another one of my posts done here: Angular JS Kinda Sucks. The main reason Angular JS will fail is because it’s difficult. Honestly, who likes to make their lives more difficult? Not this guy. That’s not to say I’m looking for the easy way out. I believe in hard work paying off, but to make things difficult just for the sake of saying that I did something difficult that I could have done with ease, other ways? That’s just ridiculous. Yes, I can take a boat across the English channel, but why not make it harder and swim it? Other than getting into the book of world records, there really is no practical reason to do so.
Which brings me to the pattern of ever failing technologies. Remember Moo Tools? Prototype? I do too, and sadly, I use NONE of them in any of my projects. jQuery has evolved with the times. It has gotten better and better, and even with its 2.0 release, revolutionized. All while keeping its key ingredient of keeping itself simple to use and logically understandable. Any one of us who struggled with JS before jQuery came along created our own JS libraries to handle mundane tasks of JS. Class lookups, selecting elements, animation, AJAX, etc. We all wondered if there was an easier way to do repetitive work like that. jQuery came along and helped us out in that department.
Prototype and moo tools tried to be innovative, but they just made things harder. Not only were they not intuitive to use, but referring to the documentation was even worse. Would take hours what jQuery could accomplish in mere minutes.
Don’t look at how many companies use those other tools right now. Wait for it and see how many companies will use those same tools in the future. 5 years, 10 years… jQuery has stood the test of time. And the reason they keep winning is because they cater to the developer, the people who are using the tool the most, and making their lives easier to deal with. It’s a complement to code, not a spaghetti nightmare filled with complexities and high learning curves.
I remember the first time I built a web page using jQuery. It was easy. It was instinctive. It was amazing. It made want to use more of it. AngularJS unfortunately, did not have that same effect on me.
In the end, I guess it’s to each their own, but too many times I’ve come across reviews that are not so pleasant to read about Angular JS. Even doing a google search on “jQuery sucks” vs “AngularJS sucks” shows that there are more results for the latter, and AngularJS has only been around for a few years, while jQuery, almost a couple of decades. You’d think that there would be more results for jQuery since it’s been around for longer, and that AngularJS has been harbored by Google.
What are your thoughts?