Vue looks great; a good move away from jQuery's low-level imperative paradigm, and I would definitely recommend it to an intermediate student interesting in leveling up. However, having taught middle-school CS for two years, I disagree with the author's assertion that it would be easier for beginners to learn.
Beginners want to make something happen. Like making alert windows pop up or (oooh!) modifying the text on a page. For these kinds of things, you actually don't need to know any of the underlying mechanisms. You just need to know that you put an id attribute on the thing you want to mess with and match it in the script. Similarly, throw the script at the bottom of the body, tell them to keep it there, and dispense with $(document).ready(). I haven't done the research (yet), but my experience tells me it's best to start people off somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, high enough that you can do something interesting right away, but low enough that you have some sense of the mechanism.
For beginners, brevity contributes to simplification. I used to write explanatory comments in scripts I gave my students. But their eyes don't parse the comments effectively, and therefore they perceive the comments as extra complexity. For this reason also, I would stick with jQuery.
But I'd love to find out. Anyone teaching intro CS who has time to run a comparison?
> Vue looks great; a good move away from jQuery's low-level imperative paradigm, and I would definitely recommend it to an intermediate student interesting in leveling up. However, having taught middle-school CS for two years, I disagree with the author's assertion that it would be easier for beginners to learn.
Yet, interestingly, people have very little problem understanding how spreadsheets work. This doesn't really argue against your point per se, but I think it makes for a plausible argument that you don't necessary want things to be imperative (jQuery) to be understandable.
EDIT: I do think presentation has a huge impact, and you really don't want explanatory commentary intermingled with a thing you're trying to understand. There's a reason we don't intermingle a single math formula/equation with comments inside the formula itself.
Beginners want to make something happen. Like making alert windows pop up or (oooh!) modifying the text on a page. For these kinds of things, you actually don't need to know any of the underlying mechanisms. You just need to know that you put an id attribute on the thing you want to mess with and match it in the script. Similarly, throw the script at the bottom of the body, tell them to keep it there, and dispense with $(document).ready(). I haven't done the research (yet), but my experience tells me it's best to start people off somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, high enough that you can do something interesting right away, but low enough that you have some sense of the mechanism.
For beginners, brevity contributes to simplification. I used to write explanatory comments in scripts I gave my students. But their eyes don't parse the comments effectively, and therefore they perceive the comments as extra complexity. For this reason also, I would stick with jQuery.
But I'd love to find out. Anyone teaching intro CS who has time to run a comparison?