I understand the concept of a library. What I don't understand is: JavaScript was designed as a domain-specific language, yet performing the most common tasks that it was designed for (manipulating the DOM)is, as you say, "very, very painful".

If you consider a language's standard library to be part of the language, then it seems like poor language design not to build-in functionality that makes manipulating the DOM at least as easy as jQuery makes it.

Thanks for the response, I will certainly peruse the jQuery source.