When did the trend of saying VanillaJS to refer to pure JavaScript come into widespread. Is the website Vanilla-js the discoverer of the term VanillaJS or was this term used even before the launch of this website?
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2Ah, the power of satire. Check out comcastify.js. You might also enjoy The Birth and Death of Javascript.– Robert HarveySep 25, 2015 at 6:33
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1 Answer
I created the Vanilla JS site.
I didn't coin the term "Vanilla JS" - it's like asking someone if they invented the term "Blue Chair". Blueness and Chairness have been things for thousands of years, and similarly, "Vanilla" in the software world usually means "plain" - Plain JS. I remember seeing it used before I created the site.
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The Google Trends data for the term "Vanilla JS", which indicates that the term came into widespread use in August 2012, coincides with the registration date of the vanilla-js.com domain name. So, while I didn't invent the term, I probably popularized it. This is funny, since I really don't like the term "vanilla" meaning "plain" - but, it's what the software community uses, so in the interest of clarity (and comedy), it's what I chose to use.
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1I think people gravitate towards libraries, at least in part, for the promise of browser independence. I believe that browser incompatibilities are much less of a problem than they used to be, but the belief in browser quirks (and the faith that people have in jQuery to fix them) still strongly persists. Sep 26, 2015 at 3:52
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1If you have to support IE3 and Netscape Navigator, having a framework smooth over differences can help. If the actual browsers that actually hit your site are latest-Chrome, latest-Firefox, and sufficiently recent IE, in practice, I find the differences are easily managed. I suspect many developers use frameworks as a way to avoid learning DOM and similar, but end up instead constantly keeping up with briefly-valuable skillsets rather than just learning the underlying API. Sep 26, 2015 at 6:55
