jQuery 1.2 - An Unexpected Surprise

Yesterday, Rey Bango alerted me to the fact that jQuery 1.2 was just released. I was not only excited by this, I was also surprised; I mean, jQuery is already so freakin hot n' sexy, how much could it possibly be improved? Well, taking a look at the release notes, I am seeing a lot of cool stuff. Nice new selectors and some very neat traversing methods. They've also trimmed a bunch of the fat, getting rid of features that were rarely used and only added dead weight to the core library.

jQuery is so powerful and so easy to use that I once had concern over it becoming my "Vibrator Dilemma". For those of you who don't know what this is, it concerns female masturbation. In this realm, the realm of female masturbation, there are two major players: manual stimulation with just the hands and manual stimulation with the aide of a vibrator. Of the women who have discussed this part of their lives with me, I have found a consistent theme and that is a fear of the vibrator.

This fear does not stem from the vibrator itself, but rather from a dependence on the vibrator. It seems that while a vibrator provides an easier and faster route to climax, these women, the ones I have talked to, almost prefer not to use it. This confuses me; I know that if there was a way that I could learn faster or build muscle faster with the aid of a small device, I would certainly not hesitate to you use it. So, naturally, I question this fear and ask for an explanation. The reasoning most often provided: no one wants to end up in a situation where they do not have a vibrator on hand and discover that they can no longer get "off" without one.

I had always thought this idea to be quite silly ... until I met jQuery. Then, suddenly, there was something very real about it. jQuery provided me with a way to write really powerful Javascript code with very little effort. What used to take me a good deal of time writing user defined functions, wiring event hooks, and lots of Google searching, suddenly took only a few seconds with a jQuery selector or two, an event binder, and an each() method call.

It was just too easy. And, after the initial high wore off, the panic set in - what if jQuery was my "Vibrator Dilemma"? What if its awesome feature set and ease-of-use slowly eroded my ability to write powerful Javascript on my own (without the help of jQuery). I finally understood what these woman were saying; sometimes (maybe a lot of the time), what we can do on our own isn't as good as what we can do with help and that loss of independence (for lack of a better term) is very scary. So scary, in fact, that we then choose to perform at a sub-optimal level just so we can say that we did it on our own.

Well, not me - not this time at least. I know that jQuery is awesome. I know that jQuery allows me to write better code than I could have written before I met it. I am OK with this and I embrace it. There is no dilemma to be had - jQuery is easier, faster, better and I will use it. It is simply "the way".

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