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Angular(1) wasn't simple but knowing basic stuff made it possible to do complicated things quickly. Angular lost a lot of momentum when they decided Angular had

Angular(1) wasn't simple but knowing basic stuff made it possible to do complicated things quickly. Angular lost a lot of momentum when they decided Angular had to look like JEE and become a framework trying to justify its existence with complexity. React had the right idea, just make view management simple, don't force some bullshit IoC container on Javascript and that's it. If you want IoC that's your problem. Ultimately the problem is that nothing replaces React natively in web API. A tool such as React shouldn't be useful anymore and Web Components isn't as ubiquitous as it was envisioned to be. In fact, I've never worked in any business that used Web Components. But the biggest issues are on the node.js side and all the complex pipelines put in place in order to fix front-end development. In fine, the tools that will be successful are the ones that will still be actively maintained 5 years from now, and most of the libs/projects will not.

kls 6y ago
I see it a little differently, Angular 1 lost momentum because it was a bad framework. It was clearly written by people that did not have a lot of experience productionalizing code. Further they choose new and convoluted naming for concepts that already had names. The came up with a creative new way to introduce globals thru rootscope and performance was abysmal. Their component model was leaky at best and the whole framework encouraged writing monolithic controllers that where in the same vain of Backbone.js. There where actually good frameworks at that time such as Dojo they just did not get the mindshare that Angular got and a lot of that was due to it being incubated at Google. The second part of the issue is there where not many people doing hardcore Javascript programming and so there was not a depth of deep CS knowledge in the front end space. It took more and more of them reluctantly converting over, getting one look at Angular and going look guys this is bad because of X,Y and Z. Angular 1 actually set the state of the art back compared to some of the other offerings at the time. The absolute tell, was when the team had to admit it, admit they where going to scrap it for a total rewrite that was to become Angular 2 and on. The reason React has done so well, is that core team members had deeper CS experience, understood other paradigms for UI development and understood that the best state of the art for UI right now, is a render loop. If you converted it to C, squinted at it long enough you would see the very old, very tried and very true Windows render loop in it. They took a proven pattern, bolted it to the virtual DOM and brought it to the web. They did not perform miracles, they stuck to what has been proven to work. Well the virtual DOM was a pretty clever hack, but the rest is UI dev 101. The problem was most the JS developers at the time, never had that back experience of desktop UI development and a good deal of them had come to development by way of learning HTML, CSS and then bits and pieces of JS as they needed to.

kls 6y ago

I see it a little differently, Angular 1 lost momentum because it was a bad framework. It was clearly written by people that did not have a lot of experience productionalizing code. Further they choose new and convoluted naming for concepts that already had names. The came up with a creative new way to introduce globals thru rootscope and performance was abysmal. Their component model was leaky at best and the whole framework encouraged writing monolithic controllers that where in the same vain of Backbone.js. There where actually good frameworks at that time such as Dojo they just did not get the mindshare that Angular got and a lot of that was due to it being incubated at Google. The second part of the issue is there where not many people doing hardcore Javascript programming and so there was not a depth of deep CS knowledge in the front end space. It took more and more of them reluctantly converting over, getting one look at Angular and going look guys this is bad because of X,Y and Z. Angular 1 actually set the state of the art back compared to some of the other offerings at the time. The absolute tell, was when the team had to admit it, admit they where going to scrap it for a total rewrite that was to become Angular 2 and on. The reason React has done so well, is that core team members had deeper CS experience, understood other paradigms for UI development and understood that the best state of the art for UI right now, is a render loop. If you converted it to C, squinted at it long enough you would see the very old, very tried and very true Windows render loop in it. They took a proven pattern, bolted it to the virtual DOM and brought it to the web. They did not perform miracles, they stuck to what has been proven to work. Well the virtual DOM was a pretty clever hack, but the rest is UI dev 101. The problem was most the JS developers at the time, never had that back experience of desktop UI development and a good deal of them had come to development by way of learning HTML, CSS and then bits and pieces of JS as they needed to.