100% agree on the common language front. The real challenge is when you&#x27;re dealing with a language that has framework saturation, so there isn&#x27;t really a &quot;common&quot; framework.<p>Ruby and Python have Rails and Django which goes a LOOOOONG way in fixing this problem. Not many languages have that one, dominant framework and usually that&#x27;s because people keep inventing new ones to deal with shortcomings of current ones OR that the frameworks do so little on top of what the language already offers that it&#x27;s easy to create your own. Javascript and PHP are clear cut cases for the latter since both languages are out of the box built for the web. jQuery was the last real unification in the Javascript world.<p>I don&#x27;t entirely care which framework becomes dominant as much as I just want A framework to become dominant. React looks like it is gaining that momentum, but you immediately see the problem play out when there&#x27;s a thread about how great React is followed by 100 &quot;X is better because it doesn&#x27;t handle Y the way that React does&quot; followed by another post about how &quot;X is worse because of the way it handles Y&quot;. There&#x27;s something about the Javascript world that seems ready to create new frameworks instead of contributing to existing ones.<p>I took a sales class years ago and the biggest takeaway from it was &quot;People buy pain relief&quot;. jQuery was dominant because it solved a huge pain point, cross browser compatibility, in a way that made natural sense for people working in the browser by using CSS references...AND it was built to run side by side with any other JS library (Prototype, Mootools, etc) so you could safely invest in learning it and know you&#x27;d be able to use it on any project that came along. During a time when IE6 compatibility was a big deal this was huge. During a time when a lot of people were trying to solve the problem and you&#x27;d inevitably end up on a project that chose one of the other dozen options, side by side compatibility was huge.<p>These were major points of pain relief that jQuery brought to the table and that&#x27;s how it won.