I was hoping for an article on the deeper semiotic meaning of why programmers and which ones with what experiences were drawn to the ideas of jQuery when they were. That's an interesting topic for any programming language that achieves success and the micro intellectual developments that they represent, SQL v NoSQL for instance, and other pendulum swings.
Problem is those always erupt into flame wars, people don't like being deconstructed, I wish it wasn't so hard, self awareness is a good thing, even if the deconstruction is a leaky abstraction as generalizations are.
Yes, I too was deeply disappointed. I believe you could do an entire PhD dissertation of deconstruction of the semitoic meaning of why j is lower case in jQuery. Is it symbolic of humankind's struggle against our basic instinct to organically generate hierarchical structures to subvert understanding of true meaning?
jQuery popularized use of CSS selectors in clients, and probably had a role in browser vendors adding querySelectorAll.
implicit iteration (obviating for-loops) across a node-set, type-agnostic starting points (constructor accepts a snippet of HTML, a selector, a node or another jQuery object), and simple chaining (functions return 'this') enable concise code
on top of this it smooths out DOM API inconsistencies and quirks between browsers
A deconstruction would look more at things like subconscious signaling, cultural values and biological influences. For a funny play on the less interesting distractions that a lot of deconstructionists of the last century embarrassed themselves with see dugmartin's comment above, I was trying to lean away from that school by using the word semiotic, but dugmartin expertly nailed that too :)
Problem is those always erupt into flame wars, people don't like being deconstructed, I wish it wasn't so hard, self awareness is a good thing, even if the deconstruction is a leaky abstraction as generalizations are.
Then again, we do have Yegge ;-)