John Resig and the Rise of Modern JavaScript Libraries

John Resig is probably the youngest person ever mentioned in the IT History Journal. At the time of writing, he is only 42 years old. Still, his place here is absolutely deserved. He is the creator of jQuery.

John Resig was born in Boston and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he also started working on jQuery. After university, he quickly became an important figure for the entire industry. The growing popularity of jQuery and its simple idea — making frontend development easier — turned Resig into one of the world’s leading JavaScript experts.

Back in the 2000s, JavaScript was widely seen as a bad programming language that barely had a place on the main stage of the IT industry. Resig was one of the people who helped make JavaScript better, and over time, that work paid off.

At first, jQuery helped hundreds of thousands of developers build millions of websites. Later, JavaScript itself — along with newer frameworks — started improving as well, inspired in part by ideas that first became popular through jQuery.

That is also something we owe to John Resig.

See also Celebrating Claude Shannon: The Innovator Who Defined the Bit and Shaped Digital Communication.