Comment by Ovidiu Bădiță on "Without looking it up, do you know how to do an AJAX request without using jQuery or some other library?"

There is no value in knowing details of implementation when you use abstractions that are validated by community and experience. If you brag that you can do XYZ in a native way, you focus on meaningless aspects of development and miss the bigger picture. Only in school you need to know meaningless things to pass some exam. But in real life, ability to think and solve problems is far more important than the ability to implement stuff from scratch. There are lots of problems that I could not solve without looking up the quirks. But I think that there is a lot more value in admitting you do not know all the details, and if you do need to write it all by yourself, you will look it up and do a good job. Humans forget stuff. If one can implement a feature by hand without looking it up, in a while, he will fail, but still think that he can do it. But he will forget a small detail, and the code will have bugs. Never try to remember constants in science. And such things, in our scope, are constants. And they belong in a library or config file. Not in our head.

@Misael Taveras: For learning purposes, for a class, is good to implement such a thing for practice and for developing basic programming skills. Just don't make a career out of it. When you put apps in production, no one is impressed by such skills. The problem is that if you were never able to write such a program from scratch, you will have a hard time solving real business problems. You need to learn in school things that seem meaningless, but it is to develop some thinking patterns that would serve you later on. You will never actually do what you learn. But still, that learning is gold. You will probably never need to solve an integral ever after college. But then again, a programmer that can understand calculus will always find smarter solutions than one who does not. Especially if it is with n dimensional spaces. Thinking in n-dimensional geometry will help you have a much easier time dealing with complex data structures. Same as playing chess or go... In themselves, all those things are meaningless. For the problem you try to solve. But they help in shaping a mind. My previous comment was only for using that approach in production. Not in learning.

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