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Why Angular 2/4 Is Too Little, Too Late

34 points by weitingliu 9y ago

iopuy 9y ago
Interesing article, I hadn't spent the time to follow the drama of these frameworks as we are still using AngularJS 1.X at work. I enjoy working with AngularJS and would be satisfied to build future projects with it. Will I be missing out if I choose to stick with an end-of-life framework that does everything I need or is it worth while to make the jump and invest the time to relearn something that I have already solved? Truly confused here.
- rajangdavis 9y ago
  I would still use Angular 1.* for certain projects, but I feel like it has to be the tool that works when nothing else will. I would take a look at React and Mithril. Mithril is pretty neat in that it's fast, lightweight, and everything's in javascript. I like that it is functional which totally changed how I approach Angular stuff. React is/was kind of hard for me to grok but it's not hard to get something going, just difficult to break certain habits coming from Angular.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  I learned React and Angular 2 at the same time during resume padding for a desperate job search :). Angular2 is a massive pile of needless shiny objects. On one hand, I LOVE Typescript to death. When you turn on all the strict compiler checks it's hard to write broken JavaScript for once. Combine it with TSLint and it has resulted in the first "nice" JavaScript development experience and codebase I've ever seen. That said, Typescript was the best thing about Angular2. When I figured out how to use it with React a lot of excitement faded away. A prime example... Angular2 has its own web client when Fetch polyfill is small and works great. All this needless complexity and replication of browser API's has bloated Angular codebase to the point that it's basically unusable without "AOT Compilation" which makes debugging hell and isn't compatible with a lot of libraries. What the web really needed was Typescript and a nice UI library. React + Typescript fulfills those needs. Most of Angular now has nothing to do with UI and IMO is needless bloat.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
Having used both react and Angular... Angular is a massively over-engineered mess. It abstracts away so much of web app development that anything built using it will be obsolete the moment Google stops supporting it. It abstracts away error handling, the http client(????), compilation, uses (still) non standard decorators to function. I would be fine with this if those were broken parts of JavaScript, but those are some of the few things that work fine. Instead of paving over the bad parts of JS they built a platform within a platform. Not to mention the learning curve is insane because of this. Might as well throw your knowledge of JS and browsers API's out the window because you won't be using any of those in Angular4. It's the new webforms
- reednj 9y ago
  More like the new silverlight, especially in the way that big companies are jumping on board. I think it will suffer the same fate as well and be quietly abandoned.
- lozenge 9y ago
  A platform within a platform - that sounds similar to Google Web Toolkit which let you build SPAs entirely in Java without writing any JS or DOM manipulation. It was behind the original Gmail interface, which felt groundbreaking at the time. It seems like they're trying to do it again, but the web has moved on.
svdev 9y ago
Also: Angular 2's Change Detection is a flaming tire fire of needless complexity. Everyone benchmarks a Todo app and concludes that it has comparable perf to React. In practice, Angular 2's Change Detection makes apps incredibly slow. Change Detection in a reasonably large app resembles a bucket of water, sloshing back and forth. Every template event and timer causes your Component tree to be re-rendered every time. Because Angular doesn't encourage immutable data by default, and its ngFor directive optimizes for mutating data... Apps have a tremendous amount of trouble migrating to OnPush at a later time. It's a mine field riddled with gotchas and edge cases. Angular2 lacks coherence. Or maybe its unifying theme is massive, needless complexity. It's not worth the trouble.

34 points by weitingliu 9y ago

Interesing article, I hadn't spent the time to follow the drama of these frameworks as we are still using AngularJS 1.X at work. I enjoy working with AngularJS and would be satisfied to build future projects with it. Will I be missing out if I choose to stick with an end-of-life framework that does everything I need or is it worth while to make the jump and invest the time to relearn something that I have already solved? Truly confused here.

rajangdavis 9y ago
I would still use Angular 1.* for certain projects, but I feel like it has to be the tool that works when nothing else will. I would take a look at React and Mithril. Mithril is pretty neat in that it's fast, lightweight, and everything's in javascript. I like that it is functional which totally changed how I approach Angular stuff. React is/was kind of hard for me to grok but it's not hard to get something going, just difficult to break certain habits coming from Angular.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
I learned React and Angular 2 at the same time during resume padding for a desperate job search :). Angular2 is a massive pile of needless shiny objects. On one hand, I LOVE Typescript to death. When you turn on all the strict compiler checks it's hard to write broken JavaScript for once. Combine it with TSLint and it has resulted in the first "nice" JavaScript development experience and codebase I've ever seen. That said, Typescript was the best thing about Angular2. When I figured out how to use it with React a lot of excitement faded away. A prime example... Angular2 has its own web client when Fetch polyfill is small and works great. All this needless complexity and replication of browser API's has bloated Angular codebase to the point that it's basically unusable without "AOT Compilation" which makes debugging hell and isn't compatible with a lot of libraries. What the web really needed was Typescript and a nice UI library. React + Typescript fulfills those needs. Most of Angular now has nothing to do with UI and IMO is needless bloat.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

Having used both react and Angular... Angular is a massively over-engineered mess. It abstracts away so much of web app development that anything built using it will be obsolete the moment Google stops supporting it. It abstracts away error handling, the http client(????), compilation, uses (still) non standard decorators to function. I would be fine with this if those were broken parts of JavaScript, but those are some of the few things that work fine. Instead of paving over the bad parts of JS they built a platform within a platform. Not to mention the learning curve is insane because of this. Might as well throw your knowledge of JS and browsers API's out the window because you won't be using any of those in Angular4. It's the new webforms

reednj 9y ago
More like the new silverlight, especially in the way that big companies are jumping on board. I think it will suffer the same fate as well and be quietly abandoned.
lozenge 9y ago
A platform within a platform - that sounds similar to Google Web Toolkit which let you build SPAs entirely in Java without writing any JS or DOM manipulation. It was behind the original Gmail interface, which felt groundbreaking at the time. It seems like they're trying to do it again, but the web has moved on.

svdev 9y ago

Also: Angular 2's Change Detection is a flaming tire fire of needless complexity. Everyone benchmarks a Todo app and concludes that it has comparable perf to React. In practice, Angular 2's Change Detection makes apps incredibly slow. Change Detection in a reasonably large app resembles a bucket of water, sloshing back and forth. Every template event and timer causes your Component tree to be re-rendered every time. Because Angular doesn't encourage immutable data by default, and its ngFor directive optimizes for mutating data... Apps have a tremendous amount of trouble migrating to OnPush at a later time. It's a mine field riddled with gotchas and edge cases. Angular2 lacks coherence. Or maybe its unifying theme is massive, needless complexity. It's not worth the trouble.