Imperative jQuery isn't that bad at all. I agree with you. Once I actually sat down and really learned Javascript 4 or 5 years ago my jQuery got a lot better. I don't think developers understand how to write maintainable jQuery. I see a lot of code where people unbind events before they bind and not using the .on methods.

It will still crumble in super complex interfaces though. Which in my experience don't pop up that often, and when they do it's only on one or two pages.

The new tabbed interface of Stack Overflow (in alpha) is all pure jQuery and it's fairly complex. I don't think it "crumbles" at all.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/308875/new-navigatio...

Disclaimer: I was one of the developers.

That's awesome. We need more developers like you writing blog posts and going on Podcasts to kind of balance out this "chasing new shiny things all the time developers". When a tech becomes big there's a million blog posts about why it's awesome(extjs, backbone, knockout, angular, react). I've seen it all. Not enough constructive views on the other side.

jquery spaghetti code can be quite readable if you're smart about layout... group things into sections, arrange everything sequentially where possible, etc etc

I've had to do a fair amount of complex UI and, frankly, I don't see why people stress so much about it. I rarely end up with more than a screen's worth of event handling code (which is a small amount of pasta, really), and things flow around fairly intuitively if you've any experience building non-web UIs

It feels like a lot of this language churn is purists reinventing the wheel. In previous comments I've ripped into specific aspects of this complaint, and an alarmingly large proportion of responses boil down to, "well, but I can't have feature XXXXXXXX or YYYYY with your stack! it's worthless!" XXXXXX is usually something like syntax highlighting, or intellisense, or some other triviality. Nobody EVER mentioned maintainability, or simplicity, or elegance, or any of these other, broader principles, without also providing a dissonant opinion.

Well you know what? I can write clean, performant, raw javascript and jQuery and I am damn proud of it. I don't need your stupid, always-changing tech. It sucks; I'm 31, but the only people I can relate to here are the old men. GOML, you kids are cray-cray

It sucks; I'm 31, but the only people I can relate to here are the old men. Nope, 31, you're an old man now.

sigh :)

> I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and it works exactly as expected.

This is a factor taken for granted far, far too often.