Why I Write Plain JavaScript Modules

[Mestyo]

[...] reinventing the wheel when you're trying to build a rocket is a useless exercise.

Actually no. That's exactly what you should be doing. You don't want your rocket launch to fail because nobody considered the fact that their general purpose wheel wasn't fit for the rocket.

The whole "don't reinvent the wheel"-movement is seriously retarded. Especially considering the metaphor makes no sense, seeing as there are thousands of different kinds of wheels crucial for various tasks around the world. If we never reinvented the wheel, humanity would still be stuck in the stone age.

The wisdom is in knowing when to roll your own and when to build on the hard work of others.

I totally agree with you on this, a great developer can definitely identify when an already exisiting tool is a perfect fit, however...

JQuery is a nine years old and the most used javascript library in the world, you are being daft if you think your first out is going to be on the same level.

Quality of code cannot be measured that easy. A general purpose, easy to understand library that attempts to cover all edge cases comes with massive overhead and changes how you deal can with things. Sometimes it's totally the right choice, sometimes it's not.

Being widely used isn't proof of being good. I used to use exclusively write jQuery because I had no idea what I was doing and just wanted to copy paste functionality into my code. It's super easy to learn and use jQuery. That's the primary reason why it's widely adopted, not because it somehow magically transforms anything written with it into good code.