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AngularJS was indeed a bit of a pain when we switched to Angular 2+ and beyond, but it was so worth it. I chose it because of the skillset that our current (sm

by ourcat 6y ago

AngularJS was indeed a bit of a pain when we switched to Angular 2+ and beyond, but it was so worth it. I chose it because of the skillset that our current (small) team has. There's no way our 'designer' (more an HTML/CSS guy) could have wrapped his head around JSX, the way it mixes scripts with layout markup. The way Angular separates concerns for us is great. And the components are extremely flexible and reactive and useful for iteration. And lazy-loaded routings? Yes please. And with the Angular CLI and TypeScript typings and using VSCode it's an absolute joy to build sites with.

swsieber 6y ago
Oof. I work on an angular app and the build is slow as molasses because it's big. And we of course don't want to move away from the official build tool because build time improvements are always "right around the corner".
- ourcat 6y ago
  True. The build times are slow. But the recent versions (and updating is also a breeze - mostly) should be faster. And particularly if you drop support for ES5 browsers.
- nkw 6y ago
  You might consider NX if build times are an issue. It is monorepo based and includes computation caching[2] and incremental builds, but under the hood uses the angular build tools. We've found it pleasant to work with. [1] https://nx.dev/latest/angular/core-concepts/computation-caching https://nx.dev/latest/angular/core-concepts/computation-cach...
nickthemagicman 6y ago
JSX always seemed like a red flag to me. It was redesigning something that already exists to make it so that it uses non native browser functionality? Also the portability looked like an issue from it. I don't understand the use case for it. Vue and apparently Angular use basic browser friendly components.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Why does it really matter if the code you write is browser friendly or not? Everything is transpiled to browser code anyways, that includes Vue and Angular and JSX. None of the code you write is ever really touched by a browser anymore. At the very least it's minified.
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    Agree completely! I think the whole ecosystem is insane! Something that needs 3 or more layers of transpilation...is not right. Typescript to Babylon to JS. Sass to css. These are workarounds for native JS warts. That's why Im excited about NATIVE web components and future releases of JavaScript becoming sophisticated enough that we can ignore all of this framework insanity. Or even better...web assembly somehow taking over and making all of this pointless. Native Typescript. Yes please. But to address your point, you're locked into JSX a lot more than someone writing in native browser code that doesn't need transpilation and can be ported between other frameworks at the end of the day.
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      > But to address your point, you're locked into JSX a lot more than someone writing in native browser code that doesn't need transpilation and can be ported between other frameworks at the end of the day Not really, because at the end of the day you still have to write the HTML and CSS and everything to render anything in a browser, the JSX really just gives you a new way to compose it. Now if you're using other styling frameworks that provide their own components, you might not have access to that HTML but that's not a JSX problem that's a "you are too reliant on outside dependency" problem. Also, transforming code into a runnable form has been a part of programming since we first invented compiled languages. Your comments about transpilation seem really bizarre with that in mind.
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        Transforming code. Compiling has. Transpiling is much less common and seems to me to be an anti pattern or a sign that something's not correct in what you're building on top of.
WorldMaker 6y ago
> And lazy-loaded routings? Yes please. All the React routers I know of support lazy-loading well. I'd argue far better than Angular handles it. React components tree shake extremely well out of the box and I've rarely had to worry about bundle size when lazy-loading in React. Whereas Angular's dependency injection framework and its "modules", in addition to being irritating busy work as soon as you realize you can't trust the CLI's scaffolding, do nothing but get in the way of proper tree-shaking and good webpack chunks/bundles.
lytefm 6y ago
Angular is opinionated and comes with batteries included. Not counting the AnguarJS mess, Angular has been extremely stable. With a small and dynamic team that loves functional programming and reactive state management, React is great. But in larger enterprise projects with many experienced Java/.NET devs, Angular just seems to be the better choice to me.

by ourcat 6y ago

swsieber 6y ago

Oof. I work on an angular app and the build is slow as molasses because it's big. And we of course don't want to move away from the official build tool because build time improvements are always "right around the corner".

ourcat 6y ago
True. The build times are slow. But the recent versions (and updating is also a breeze - mostly) should be faster. And particularly if you drop support for ES5 browsers.
nkw 6y ago
You might consider NX if build times are an issue. It is monorepo based and includes computation caching[2] and incremental builds, but under the hood uses the angular build tools. We've found it pleasant to work with. [1] https://nx.dev/latest/angular/core-concepts/computation-caching https://nx.dev/latest/angular/core-concepts/computation-cach...

nickthemagicman 6y ago

JSX always seemed like a red flag to me. It was redesigning something that already exists to make it so that it uses non native browser functionality? Also the portability looked like an issue from it. I don't understand the use case for it. Vue and apparently Angular use basic browser friendly components.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
Why does it really matter if the code you write is browser friendly or not? Everything is transpiled to browser code anyways, that includes Vue and Angular and JSX. None of the code you write is ever really touched by a browser anymore. At the very least it's minified.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Agree completely! I think the whole ecosystem is insane! Something that needs 3 or more layers of transpilation...is not right. Typescript to Babylon to JS. Sass to css. These are workarounds for native JS warts. That's why Im excited about NATIVE web components and future releases of JavaScript becoming sophisticated enough that we can ignore all of this framework insanity. Or even better...web assembly somehow taking over and making all of this pointless. Native Typescript. Yes please. But to address your point, you're locked into JSX a lot more than someone writing in native browser code that doesn't need transpilation and can be ported between other frameworks at the end of the day.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    > But to address your point, you're locked into JSX a lot more than someone writing in native browser code that doesn't need transpilation and can be ported between other frameworks at the end of the day Not really, because at the end of the day you still have to write the HTML and CSS and everything to render anything in a browser, the JSX really just gives you a new way to compose it. Now if you're using other styling frameworks that provide their own components, you might not have access to that HTML but that's not a JSX problem that's a "you are too reliant on outside dependency" problem. Also, transforming code into a runnable form has been a part of programming since we first invented compiled languages. Your comments about transpilation seem really bizarre with that in mind.
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      Transforming code. Compiling has. Transpiling is much less common and seems to me to be an anti pattern or a sign that something's not correct in what you're building on top of.

WorldMaker 6y ago

> And lazy-loaded routings? Yes please. All the React routers I know of support lazy-loading well. I'd argue far better than Angular handles it. React components tree shake extremely well out of the box and I've rarely had to worry about bundle size when lazy-loading in React. Whereas Angular's dependency injection framework and its "modules", in addition to being irritating busy work as soon as you realize you can't trust the CLI's scaffolding, do nothing but get in the way of proper tree-shaking and good webpack chunks/bundles.

lytefm 6y ago

Angular is opinionated and comes with batteries included. Not counting the AnguarJS mess, Angular has been extremely stable. With a small and dynamic team that loves functional programming and reactive state management, React is great. But in larger enterprise projects with many experienced Java/.NET devs, Angular just seems to be the better choice to me.