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Congratulations to the Angular 2 team on shipping before Christmas. The estimate was originally somewhere around early 2016, so this is a huge deal for them to

Congratulations to the Angular 2 team on shipping before Christmas. The estimate was originally somewhere around early 2016, so this is a huge deal for them to get this out before the year was up. Unfortunately, Angular 2 launched into beta too late. In the amount of time that Angular 2 has taken to get to beta, ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken developers by storm with its simplistic component based approach. Unlike React, Google does not really treat Angular as a first-class citizen because they have such split focus and conflicting React like library for web components called Polymer. They provide some resources, but nowhere near the amount of resources that Facebook throws behind React and React Native. Now lets talk about the fact that the Angular 2 project got off to a shaky start and I know they actually rewrote various parts from scratch more than once (hence why it took so long to reach beta, approximately 2 years). That horrible templating syntax needs to be mentioned, the decision to use square and rounded brackets for binding events/data and using things like asterisks in my opinion makes Angular 2 fall into the same trap that Angular 1 did in regards to developer accessibility. I am really loving TypeScript these days and I think the decision to support it as a first-class citizen out-of-the-box was a good one (the partnership with Microsoft definitely paid off). But with that said, I think Rob Eisenberg (of Durandal fame) beat the Angular 2 team to the punch in the small space of a year in releasing his framework Aurelia (http://aurelia.io http://aurelia.io). It is what Angular 2 should have been in my opinion. Nice syntax, convention over configuration and a breeze to use.

debaserab2 11y ago
> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken develo Do you have a citation for that? I still see tons of user land projects using angular 1.
- joshfraser 11y ago
  I just checked Datanyze which crawls the Alexa 1m and more to see which services & libraries websites are using. They've detected 234,003 sites using Angular and 2,069 using React.
  - woah 11y ago
    Angular is popular among developers who make products for the kind of person who would install the Alexa toolbar.
    - iSnow 11y ago
      That comment reeks of sour grapes.
  - VeilEm 11y ago
    I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers. React is usually used alongside significant tooling like babel and webpack/browserify and some flux library. It's probably more complex. You can't just drop some js script file in your HTML document and go with that. I say that as someone who thinks React is the future of JavaScript development and there's no chance I will ever go back to separate templates so Angular of whatever version is just automatically disqualified. It would be like going back in time and I do not want to do this.
    - Offler 11y ago
      Angular 2 also requires that level of tooling (both allow you to use ES5 and don't require tooling but most devs won't use them like that).
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers. Both are meant for engineers, if by that you mean developers.
    - sandGorgon 11y ago
      Yes you can! We are using requirejs, babel,es6 to have a react setup that runs completely in the browser. But for some reason, react makes this information really obscure. It works really well. Including breakpoints in chrome,etc.
- coldtea 11y ago
  As expected, since angular 1 came out much earlier, and have the same hype React has had for the last 2 years then. But checking from HN, blog postings, job announcements, team posts, new turorials (video, books), etc, React seems to be winning now.
- dyeje 11y ago
  Yeah, the google trends don't seem to support that either: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20angularjs&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20angular...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmdkeen 11y ago
    One slight issue there is that React is much less frequently referred to as reactjs compared to Angular - even down to the official project URLs. Obviously the Google trend search for "react" has lots of false positives, but some of the major news points it picked out include references to the right react.
- DigitalSea 11y ago
  I am not talking about market share, I am more referring to sentiment in the community towards React. Just based on my observations, front-end developers love React and many more seemingly warming up to it. Considering React is still a new library, give it some time, but it does not take a trend to see that it is gaining popularity while Angular 1.x has peaked in my opinion and 2.0 will take a lot of convincing to get people to use it. I personally use React and Node.js for a lot of the stuff I work on these days (both professionally and freelance projects). I know a lot of developers who use React, so while a Google search (not exactly scientific either in my opinion) yields low use of React, just based on the circle that I frequent, there are a lot of people using React and in 2016 we will see more people using it. The last two freelance projects I worked on (for pretty large companies) were built using React, word is travelling fast. A lot of people are using Angular 1.x, but I know for a fact that not all of them will migrate over to 2.0 when the time comes. The learning curve might be smaller, but Angular 2 still falls into the trap of being over engineered in certain parts (like template syntax).
  - Zombieball 11y ago
    I completely share your sentiments. I am currently an Angular 1.X guy myself with limited knowledge of React. However given the little knowledge I have of React vs. Angular 2.X I find it more likely my team would migrate to React than Angular 2 (doubly so considering the benefits offered by React native).
  - estefan 11y ago
    This mirrors my experience. I left Angular 1.x for React and would need a huge amount of convincing to learn Angular 2.x. The killer feature of React for me is the full stack approach - react, react native, relay & graphql.
- myth_drannon 11y ago
  based on HN hiring posts, more companies ask for React than Angular experience. React growth in 2015 is absolutely stunning. http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2015/november.html?compare1=AngularJS&compare2=Backbone&compare3=Ember&compare4=React http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2015/...
  - LocalPCGuy 11y ago
    Is HN hiring posts REALLY representative of the industry as a whole? Seems more like the startup scene and often forgets about all the developers out there in corporations, agencies and other work that don't get represented here.
    - mercurial 11y ago
      I can say that here in Denmark, the typical reaction to React will be "what is that?". On the other hand, Angular has the reassuring feeling of heavy corporate development which will make people earning their salary by working on management-sanctioned .NET technologies (that is, most developers) all warm and fuzzy. I think, to a large extent, it depends on people's reaction to the word "framework". Disclaimer: we switched to React at my company.
    - myth_drannon 11y ago
      Usually startups pickup new tech and slow moving corporations follow later(whatever by buying these startups or by hiring ex-startup employees).
  - sebak 11y ago
    Here in Europe, I asked around to some firms like Aston Carter and Computerfutures recently. They had 0 requests from customers for React and A LOT for angular. Now these work mainly for enterprise companies which are hard to convince of a new technology. So all of these companies will transition much easier to angular 2 (just because they know the name 'angular') then to react.
- bmm6o 11y ago
  Yeah, you're right not to trust statements about projects "capturing mind share" and what is "really hot right now" (not intending to quote OP). People get into their little communities and don't realize that they are not at all representative of the larger world. To make something up, I can totally believe that React is really popular in the San Diego startup scene, but it's a mistake to extrapolate that too far in any dimension. Add to that confirmation bias on the part of people seeing these trends, and everything could be taking over at the same time.
  - huuu 11y ago
    This is very true. A lot of people also forget that a ton of stuff that is developed never shows up in your favorite search engine. Intranets, internal apps, and so on.
  - vcarl 11y ago
    As a counterpoint, there are a decent number of people learning it around where I am in southeast Michigan. There was a conference in Detroit, they said that they got a ton of React talk submissions. I used it at a small business print shop, admittedly they just let IT do their own thing. I think there are probably still more Angular devs, but I'll be interested to see how it evolves in the next few years.
    - Ralfp 11y ago
      But this can be countested ad nauseum via continously moving on to the next place.
    - bmm6o 11y ago
      I don't doubt that you've found a lot of people in your area who are interested in it. But it doesn't even imply that it's more popular than Angular in SE MI, much less anywhere else. You can't offer up another anecdote and pretend that it's data. And I'm sure you did fine work, but small business print shops are not exactly industry trend setters. What difference would it make in the bigger picture if you had chosen Handlebar for that project?
  - 11y ago
- jbeja 11y ago
  Well React approach of composition has reach even others programming languages and communities and with things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer.
  - grumblestumble 11y ago
    Really, React invented the idea of composition? Please, tell me more...
    - jbeja 11y ago
      I never said that invented anything, just that its ideas have reached others communities (invented originally by it or not)
  - mercurial 11y ago
    > things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer. Totally not inspired by Elm and traditional FRP. I mean, I use it daily and it's great, but you have to realize that a lot of what React brings to the front is bundling some well-known paradigms together.
    - mateuszf 11y ago
      True, but in comparison to typical, common javascript development workflows (using tools like backbone and angular) - it is a game changer.
- azernik 11y ago
  Going by NPM, I'm seeing 225K downloads per week for react and 64K per week for Angular. Unfortunately, bower does not seem to collect download stats (I assume because downloads don't go through a Bower-controlled server), and I find it very likely that react usage is strongly correlated with NPM usage. React treats bower very much as a second-class citizen, even using a separate repo for its bower repository.
pacomerh 11y ago
The comparison to React is unfair imo. Angular 1.x is being used very very widely across small and big shops. It just doesn't have the amount of hype React has. I really like what React offers as a new paradigm that leans towards component reusability, functional approaches and a cleaner data flow, but that doesn't mean this will be a solution for everyone. Angular 1.x and 2.x aren't heavy for nothing, it solves an additional set of problems that I think its worth checking out.
- hitekker 11y ago
  I'm not sure about the point about Angular being used far and wide-- it's true that angular has seen some decent adoption, but I also feel people are trying to move away from it ASAP. For example, OkCupid (from what I've heard) based its mobile architecture on AngularJS, but then once React matured, they basically declared all their Angular legacy and promptly shifted to doing everything in React. Even https://www.madewithangular.com/ https://www.madewithangular.com/ doesn't make clear how AngularJS is being used in the few websites it showcases. Lyft uses it for its homepage, but it does not use it anywhere else. Likewise, one the homepage for healthcare.gov, one of the websites provided: does it use a lick of "ng-" anything in its HTML. I don't disagree that Angular solves an additional set of problems, but I think the hype behind React is real, i.e. it's an actually good framework. Also, being an AngularJS developer myself, I too really dislike feeling that I've wasted my time learning yet another piece of tech that will be outmoded in the next year or so.
cheez 11y ago
> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken developers by storm with its simplistic component based approach. React has recently dominated headlines and in another few months, something else will. Meanwhile, people will keep using stuff from 3 years ago.
kayoone 11y ago
apart from a few projects that are experimenting with the latest stuff i have seen much more Angular being used in the wild than react in the last year. The project offers i got for react were more of the kind "we are experimenting with this for some small parts" while the big stuff was mostly built in Angular. Also React itself is pretty alpha and introduces breaking changes every now and then which makes it rather painful to update bigger projects. Personally i love Typescript as well and i am pretty sure NG2 will get a lot of thrust behind it, now that the api is stable.
awjr 11y ago
I usually evaluate frameworks based on the job market. In the UK there are currently 298 jobs for Angular and 109 for React (www.cwjobs.co.uk). React is up on around 40 jobs at the beginning of the year. The reality is that you should know Angular AND you should know React. These are not mutually exclusive.
- juhq 11y ago
  When you say "up around 40 jobs", do you keep a historical graph on these stats? It would be an interesting read!
  - awjr 11y ago
    I just remember looking into various frameworks at the beginning of the year and trying to evaluate if React was "worth" getting into. I'm very pragmatic about frameworks. Yes, React might be technically better than Angular 2, but it has to be better at putting food on the table. It probably will be. In the meantime, there are a lot of Angular 1 projects that will need migrating to Ang 2.
    - airlust 11y ago
      Will people bother to migrate though? I think they might just stick with what they have and if they do need to upgrade frameworks they may very well steer away from angular altogether.
      - awjr 11y ago
        Depends if they want to keep their devs. Not moving is not an option. You just need to be coding defensively.
  - microstash 11y ago
    Indeed allows you to search for terms historically (like a Google trends for jobs): http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=angularjs%2C+angular%2C+react.js%2C+reactjs%2C+react&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=angularjs%2C+angular%2C+re... React as a term is understandably a bit polluted though.
meat_fist 11y ago
> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) No, it hasn't > simplistic component based approach. "Simplistic" > Unlike React, Google does not really treat Angular as a first-class citizen because they have such split focus and conflicting React like library for web components called Polymer. They provide some resources, but nowhere near the amount of resources that Facebook throws behind React and React Native. Facebook does one thing. Google does many things.

debaserab2 11y ago

> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken develo Do you have a citation for that? I still see tons of user land projects using angular 1.

joshfraser 11y ago
I just checked Datanyze which crawls the Alexa 1m and more to see which services & libraries websites are using. They've detected 234,003 sites using Angular and 2,069 using React.
- woah 11y ago
  Angular is popular among developers who make products for the kind of person who would install the Alexa toolbar.
  - iSnow 11y ago
    That comment reeks of sour grapes.
- VeilEm 11y ago
  I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers. React is usually used alongside significant tooling like babel and webpack/browserify and some flux library. It's probably more complex. You can't just drop some js script file in your HTML document and go with that. I say that as someone who thinks React is the future of JavaScript development and there's no chance I will ever go back to separate templates so Angular of whatever version is just automatically disqualified. It would be like going back in time and I do not want to do this.
  - Offler 11y ago
    Angular 2 also requires that level of tooling (both allow you to use ES5 and don't require tooling but most devs won't use them like that).
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers. Both are meant for engineers, if by that you mean developers.
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    Yes you can! We are using requirejs, babel,es6 to have a react setup that runs completely in the browser. But for some reason, react makes this information really obscure. It works really well. Including breakpoints in chrome,etc.
coldtea 11y ago
As expected, since angular 1 came out much earlier, and have the same hype React has had for the last 2 years then. But checking from HN, blog postings, job announcements, team posts, new turorials (video, books), etc, React seems to be winning now.
dyeje 11y ago
Yeah, the google trends don't seem to support that either: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20angularjs&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20angular...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  One slight issue there is that React is much less frequently referred to as reactjs compared to Angular - even down to the official project URLs. Obviously the Google trend search for "react" has lots of false positives, but some of the major news points it picked out include references to the right react.
DigitalSea 11y ago
I am not talking about market share, I am more referring to sentiment in the community towards React. Just based on my observations, front-end developers love React and many more seemingly warming up to it. Considering React is still a new library, give it some time, but it does not take a trend to see that it is gaining popularity while Angular 1.x has peaked in my opinion and 2.0 will take a lot of convincing to get people to use it. I personally use React and Node.js for a lot of the stuff I work on these days (both professionally and freelance projects). I know a lot of developers who use React, so while a Google search (not exactly scientific either in my opinion) yields low use of React, just based on the circle that I frequent, there are a lot of people using React and in 2016 we will see more people using it. The last two freelance projects I worked on (for pretty large companies) were built using React, word is travelling fast. A lot of people are using Angular 1.x, but I know for a fact that not all of them will migrate over to 2.0 when the time comes. The learning curve might be smaller, but Angular 2 still falls into the trap of being over engineered in certain parts (like template syntax).
- Zombieball 11y ago
  I completely share your sentiments. I am currently an Angular 1.X guy myself with limited knowledge of React. However given the little knowledge I have of React vs. Angular 2.X I find it more likely my team would migrate to React than Angular 2 (doubly so considering the benefits offered by React native).
- estefan 11y ago
  This mirrors my experience. I left Angular 1.x for React and would need a huge amount of convincing to learn Angular 2.x. The killer feature of React for me is the full stack approach - react, react native, relay & graphql.
myth_drannon 11y ago
based on HN hiring posts, more companies ask for React than Angular experience. React growth in 2015 is absolutely stunning. http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2015/november.html?compare1=AngularJS&compare2=Backbone&compare3=Ember&compare4=React http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2015/...
- LocalPCGuy 11y ago
  Is HN hiring posts REALLY representative of the industry as a whole? Seems more like the startup scene and often forgets about all the developers out there in corporations, agencies and other work that don't get represented here.
  - mercurial 11y ago
    I can say that here in Denmark, the typical reaction to React will be "what is that?". On the other hand, Angular has the reassuring feeling of heavy corporate development which will make people earning their salary by working on management-sanctioned .NET technologies (that is, most developers) all warm and fuzzy. I think, to a large extent, it depends on people's reaction to the word "framework". Disclaimer: we switched to React at my company.
  - myth_drannon 11y ago
    Usually startups pickup new tech and slow moving corporations follow later(whatever by buying these startups or by hiring ex-startup employees).
- sebak 11y ago
  Here in Europe, I asked around to some firms like Aston Carter and Computerfutures recently. They had 0 requests from customers for React and A LOT for angular. Now these work mainly for enterprise companies which are hard to convince of a new technology. So all of these companies will transition much easier to angular 2 (just because they know the name 'angular') then to react.
bmm6o 11y ago
Yeah, you're right not to trust statements about projects "capturing mind share" and what is "really hot right now" (not intending to quote OP). People get into their little communities and don't realize that they are not at all representative of the larger world. To make something up, I can totally believe that React is really popular in the San Diego startup scene, but it's a mistake to extrapolate that too far in any dimension. Add to that confirmation bias on the part of people seeing these trends, and everything could be taking over at the same time.
- huuu 11y ago
  This is very true. A lot of people also forget that a ton of stuff that is developed never shows up in your favorite search engine. Intranets, internal apps, and so on.
- vcarl 11y ago
  As a counterpoint, there are a decent number of people learning it around where I am in southeast Michigan. There was a conference in Detroit, they said that they got a ton of React talk submissions. I used it at a small business print shop, admittedly they just let IT do their own thing. I think there are probably still more Angular devs, but I'll be interested to see how it evolves in the next few years.
  - Ralfp 11y ago
    But this can be countested ad nauseum via continously moving on to the next place.
  - bmm6o 11y ago
    I don't doubt that you've found a lot of people in your area who are interested in it. But it doesn't even imply that it's more popular than Angular in SE MI, much less anywhere else. You can't offer up another anecdote and pretend that it's data. And I'm sure you did fine work, but small business print shops are not exactly industry trend setters. What difference would it make in the bigger picture if you had chosen Handlebar for that project?
- 11y ago
jbeja 11y ago
Well React approach of composition has reach even others programming languages and communities and with things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer.
- grumblestumble 11y ago
  Really, React invented the idea of composition? Please, tell me more...
  - jbeja 11y ago
    I never said that invented anything, just that its ideas have reached others communities (invented originally by it or not)
- mercurial 11y ago
  > things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer. Totally not inspired by Elm and traditional FRP. I mean, I use it daily and it's great, but you have to realize that a lot of what React brings to the front is bundling some well-known paradigms together.
  - mateuszf 11y ago
    True, but in comparison to typical, common javascript development workflows (using tools like backbone and angular) - it is a game changer.
azernik 11y ago
Going by NPM, I'm seeing 225K downloads per week for react and 64K per week for Angular. Unfortunately, bower does not seem to collect download stats (I assume because downloads don't go through a Bower-controlled server), and I find it very likely that react usage is strongly correlated with NPM usage. React treats bower very much as a second-class citizen, even using a separate repo for its bower repository.

pacomerh 11y ago

The comparison to React is unfair imo. Angular 1.x is being used very very widely across small and big shops. It just doesn't have the amount of hype React has. I really like what React offers as a new paradigm that leans towards component reusability, functional approaches and a cleaner data flow, but that doesn't mean this will be a solution for everyone. Angular 1.x and 2.x aren't heavy for nothing, it solves an additional set of problems that I think its worth checking out.

hitekker 11y ago
I'm not sure about the point about Angular being used far and wide-- it's true that angular has seen some decent adoption, but I also feel people are trying to move away from it ASAP. For example, OkCupid (from what I've heard) based its mobile architecture on AngularJS, but then once React matured, they basically declared all their Angular legacy and promptly shifted to doing everything in React. Even https://www.madewithangular.com/ https://www.madewithangular.com/ doesn't make clear how AngularJS is being used in the few websites it showcases. Lyft uses it for its homepage, but it does not use it anywhere else. Likewise, one the homepage for healthcare.gov, one of the websites provided: does it use a lick of "ng-" anything in its HTML. I don't disagree that Angular solves an additional set of problems, but I think the hype behind React is real, i.e. it's an actually good framework. Also, being an AngularJS developer myself, I too really dislike feeling that I've wasted my time learning yet another piece of tech that will be outmoded in the next year or so.

cheez 11y ago

> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken developers by storm with its simplistic component based approach. React has recently dominated headlines and in another few months, something else will. Meanwhile, people will keep using stuff from 3 years ago.

kayoone 11y ago

apart from a few projects that are experimenting with the latest stuff i have seen much more Angular being used in the wild than react in the last year. The project offers i got for react were more of the kind "we are experimenting with this for some small parts" while the big stuff was mostly built in Angular. Also React itself is pretty alpha and introduces breaking changes every now and then which makes it rather painful to update bigger projects. Personally i love Typescript as well and i am pretty sure NG2 will get a lot of thrust behind it, now that the api is stable.

awjr 11y ago

I usually evaluate frameworks based on the job market. In the UK there are currently 298 jobs for Angular and 109 for React (www.cwjobs.co.uk). React is up on around 40 jobs at the beginning of the year. The reality is that you should know Angular AND you should know React. These are not mutually exclusive.

juhq 11y ago
When you say "up around 40 jobs", do you keep a historical graph on these stats? It would be an interesting read!
- awjr 11y ago
  I just remember looking into various frameworks at the beginning of the year and trying to evaluate if React was "worth" getting into. I'm very pragmatic about frameworks. Yes, React might be technically better than Angular 2, but it has to be better at putting food on the table. It probably will be. In the meantime, there are a lot of Angular 1 projects that will need migrating to Ang 2.
  - airlust 11y ago
    Will people bother to migrate though? I think they might just stick with what they have and if they do need to upgrade frameworks they may very well steer away from angular altogether.
    - awjr 11y ago
      Depends if they want to keep their devs. Not moving is not an option. You just need to be coding defensively.
- microstash 11y ago
  Indeed allows you to search for terms historically (like a Google trends for jobs): http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=angularjs%2C+angular%2C+react.js%2C+reactjs%2C+react&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=angularjs%2C+angular%2C+re... React as a term is understandably a bit polluted though.

meat_fist 11y ago

> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) No, it hasn't > simplistic component based approach. "Simplistic" > Unlike React, Google does not really treat Angular as a first-class citizen because they have such split focus and conflicting React like library for web components called Polymer. They provide some resources, but nowhere near the amount of resources that Facebook throws behind React and React Native. Facebook does one thing. Google does many things.