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"But I would never, ever, begin a new business that depends solely on Angular to survive. Why? Because Google doesn't need it. It didn't blink to give up GWT, i

by Bahamut 10y ago

"But I would never, ever, begin a new business that depends solely on Angular to survive. Why? Because Google doesn't need it. It didn't blink to give up GWT, it didn't have to think twice to decide to rewrite Angular 2 in an incompatible way to Angular 1, and so on." This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity. That rewrite is aimed at making Angular vastly improved - that doesn't equate to giving up on Angular, that is a poor analogy. In fact, Google decided to start investing vastly more resources into the Angular team, rapidly hiring and growing the team into a proper one, as opposed to it being a pet project of the Adwords team. In the next year or two, that ambition will bear much more fruit as mindshare grows with the realization of the technical problems solved & improved upon by ng2 - if React doesn't gear up to evolve, we'll probably see either a lot of defection to Angular, or a competitor that disagrees with the complexity that Angular introduces appearing to swallow React, just as React has done the same to grab disenchanted Backbone/Angular/etc. users. Otherwise, the article does a good job explaining a lot of things, but it is very defeatist, as if it is futile to try to improve upon things. I can't say I agree with that sentiment, it goes against the heart of research/trailblazing/experimentation/etc. It also makes some weak assertions, such as "One rarely benefits from big bang rewrites from scratch.", which is a generality being applied to every single situation, a fallacy. Confusing commonly accepted wisdom in development with an overextension of their meaning can lead to bad conclusions, as well as bad decision making.

educar 10y ago
> This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity. So you were quick to call somebody wrong based on complete heresay? Do you have any conclusive proof that they use it? Gmail? Analytics?
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Literally 5 seconds of Googling [1]. Turns out the app that allows Google's Ad customers (i.e. their main source of revenue) to use the Google platform is written in angular. It's also one of the oldest and largest Angular apps in existence. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg
  - educar 10y ago
    I also found https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google. It's a far far far cry from OPs original assertion that 3/4 apps in Google are made of angular.
    - Bahamut 10y ago
      The Angular team has said over 70% of web apps at Google use Angular, but I can't recall what talks they have said that at off the top of my head. Various members of the Angular team have told me this directy as well, and are pretty open about that fact in general. One told me about the broken release at one point last year bringing Google to a halt until that got fixed, since Google runs off of the master branch of Angular. Google has a lot of apps, most of them internal (I have seen some external ones too, such as a Nexus site in the past, and Google Domains. Google App Engine and Adwords also use it, as given in talks in the past - the Angular team is grouped under the Ads group within Google). Your original question for proof was completely misguided when accounting for that - examples of external facing apps does not confirm or deny percentage, it was a poorly conceived attack. Certain apps like Gmail/Inbox go through very long development cycles and have specialized requirements. An Angular team member has explained to me that sometimes some teams think they can do better with vanilla JS - none of the popular web frameworks really met Google's perf/business requirements for those behemoth apps, although with the way Angular 2 is shaping, it likely will hit the bar (the Angular team has managed to get a hello world app smaller than a react-based one, and this is before they extract out the template compiler to allow tree shaking of that for builds - very impressive perf numbers were also thrown at Google I/O last week). Google has a lot of resources they can throw at big consumer facing apps, so they can build homespun frameworks if they need to (for big sites like YouTube, Inbox, Calendar, etc.). I should also detail that I'm not someone unknowledgable about Angular and how it is used - I am one of the biggest Angular experts outside of Google, a core maintainer of one of the three most largest third party Angular libraries & involved in another top three most used third party library (UI Bootstrap and UI Router, respectively) and a contributor to many projects across the ecosystem. I am very aware of all of the things that are Angular's strengths, and its shortcomings (especially 1, and 2 to a lesser degree...but nobody is really an expert at 2 yet, excepting maybe Tobias Bosch on the Angular 2 team with his crazy work on it).
nikdaheratik 10y ago
I think you're probably right, but at the same time, Google does have a history of killing off projects for reasons that make sense to them but seem kind of arbitrary. Of course, Angular is OSS and is likely to live on into obsolescence no matter what Google ends up doing with it.
- pluma 10y ago
  Who do you think will take over Angular when Google kills it off? Is there any large company or, heck, any somewhat organized group of people outside of Google supporting Angular or using Angular at a scale that warrants the investment of maintaining the project rather than migrating to a different technology?

by Bahamut 10y ago

educar 10y ago

> This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity. So you were quick to call somebody wrong based on complete heresay? Do you have any conclusive proof that they use it? Gmail? Analytics?

ben_jones 10y ago
Literally 5 seconds of Googling [1]. Turns out the app that allows Google's Ad customers (i.e. their main source of revenue) to use the Google platform is written in angular. It's also one of the oldest and largest Angular apps in existence. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg
- educar 10y ago
  I also found https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google. It's a far far far cry from OPs original assertion that 3/4 apps in Google are made of angular.
  - Bahamut 10y ago
    The Angular team has said over 70% of web apps at Google use Angular, but I can't recall what talks they have said that at off the top of my head. Various members of the Angular team have told me this directy as well, and are pretty open about that fact in general. One told me about the broken release at one point last year bringing Google to a halt until that got fixed, since Google runs off of the master branch of Angular. Google has a lot of apps, most of them internal (I have seen some external ones too, such as a Nexus site in the past, and Google Domains. Google App Engine and Adwords also use it, as given in talks in the past - the Angular team is grouped under the Ads group within Google). Your original question for proof was completely misguided when accounting for that - examples of external facing apps does not confirm or deny percentage, it was a poorly conceived attack. Certain apps like Gmail/Inbox go through very long development cycles and have specialized requirements. An Angular team member has explained to me that sometimes some teams think they can do better with vanilla JS - none of the popular web frameworks really met Google's perf/business requirements for those behemoth apps, although with the way Angular 2 is shaping, it likely will hit the bar (the Angular team has managed to get a hello world app smaller than a react-based one, and this is before they extract out the template compiler to allow tree shaking of that for builds - very impressive perf numbers were also thrown at Google I/O last week). Google has a lot of resources they can throw at big consumer facing apps, so they can build homespun frameworks if they need to (for big sites like YouTube, Inbox, Calendar, etc.). I should also detail that I'm not someone unknowledgable about Angular and how it is used - I am one of the biggest Angular experts outside of Google, a core maintainer of one of the three most largest third party Angular libraries & involved in another top three most used third party library (UI Bootstrap and UI Router, respectively) and a contributor to many projects across the ecosystem. I am very aware of all of the things that are Angular's strengths, and its shortcomings (especially 1, and 2 to a lesser degree...but nobody is really an expert at 2 yet, excepting maybe Tobias Bosch on the Angular 2 team with his crazy work on it).

nikdaheratik 10y ago

I think you're probably right, but at the same time, Google does have a history of killing off projects for reasons that make sense to them but seem kind of arbitrary. Of course, Angular is OSS and is likely to live on into obsolescence no matter what Google ends up doing with it.

pluma 10y ago
Who do you think will take over Angular when Google kills it off? Is there any large company or, heck, any somewhat organized group of people outside of Google supporting Angular or using Angular at a scale that warrants the investment of maintaining the project rather than migrating to a different technology?