Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end
When I first started programming I was pretty lucky to get a job at a games company. My first lead was a veteran who had shipped a lot of AAA titles and he loved his war stories. He was personally interested in performance and he would often cite hardware timings for specific cpu instructions.<p>One story he told a couple of times was about some grey beard who was before his time. The grey beard was once a legend in the company, often helicoptered into projects at the last minute to help them squeeze out the last bit of performance. His secret was he had a mental library of assembly language tricks applicable to the hardware of his day. But every few years his tricks were less and less relevant as hardware changed and compilers advanced. One day the grey beard was helicoptered into my leads project and everyone expected him to get them some gains. However, this was new hardware and none of his old tricks worked.<p>I think of this story whenever I see jQuery popup on Hacker News. There is always a strong contingent of devs who swear by this library. But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn&#x27;t update his knowledge as the times changed. At one time jQuery allowed them to be the hero and &quot;Get Things Done&quot; faster than their competition. But times have changed.<p>Argue with me if you must but take stories like this one for what they are worth. The writing is on the wall for jQuery. I was writing websites before jQuery existed, during the reign of jQuery and still today. If some candidate mentioned proficiency with jQuery during an interview I would be polite but internally I would note that the person might be out of touch. Not a red flag, but a yellow flag that I would follow up on. Nothing worse than bringing on a guy who claims to be senior&#x2F;experienced and it turn out his old tricks won&#x27;t work because they are no longer appropriate.