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I have been a developer for 20 (e: I've just realised it's actually just over 25 years..) or so years now. I've attempted to "learn" Angular multiple times. I j

by Jenk 5y ago

I have been a developer for 20 (e: I've just realised it's actually just over 25 years..) or so years now. I've attempted to "learn" Angular multiple times. I just can't do it. I get mental fatigue within an hour of picking up Angular CLI, or even just watching/reading tutorials. It speaks a foreign language to me. And I've got years of React, Vue, vanilla-JS as well as Java, Kotlin, Scala, PHP, Smalltalk, Go, Rust, .NET (and the various flavours that comes in) under my belt. If I put some effort into it I could probably regurgiate some Cobol, RTF, and other now-forgotten stuff, too. But Angular? I just .. can't.

SilasX 5y ago
I tried to pick it up 5 years ago or so and my main barrier was that any tutorial, even the official Google ones, was long obsolete and their examples would fail out the gate ... but I guess that's to be expected of frameworks in tech.
neur4lnet 5y ago
Why do you think that is?
- Jenk 5y ago
  Honestly I'm not sure if there even is a big reason. The terminology doesn't feel right - I feel like I need to constantly remind myself what some of the terms mean compared to what I am used to, which I find occupies a tremendous amount of my cognitive capacity. "The tutorials are shit" doesn't help. They really suffer from the problem of the author expects the reader(s) to know what it is they are being taught ahead of time. "Tutorial 1: how to make a component. Step 1: Run `ng component <name>`. Now you have a component." type deal. Now I'm left to my own devices to find out what a component really is, etc. Another part is that it just isn't very exciting. I was/am more excited when using react or vue. I've been maintaining angular apps (albeit lightly) for nearly 2 years at my current role, but even here react is being introduced to replace it.
romanovcode 5y ago
I don't understand how can you not get Angular if you have .NET (assuming C#) "under your belt".
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Not OP but feel the same way as OP... I can use Angular just fine, it just feels like I'm working around the Angular part trying to get down to the actual stuff I'm trying to program. Whenever I do use it, I spend most of the time thinking, "I could do this a lot faster in Javascript without Angular adding extra steps along the way..."
y4mi 5y ago
Are you really talking about angular or is it more about rxjs/observables ? Because the former is really hard to imagine with what you claim to be proficient in. The reactive stuff from rxjs is another story though, few people I know really worked with any of the reactive libraries before and mostly everyone I know struggled with the concepts at first, no matter which language they were using them in
- vips7L 5y ago
  One of my projects for work is RxJava and I’ll never touch anything Rx again. I don’t see any benefit it brings outside of making your project and control flow convoluted.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    That's unfortunate because reactive programming shines when you have continuous data flows and want to run pipelines against them; whether that's clicks, websocket events, queue items, etc.
  - Offpics 5y ago
    I work with rxjs and its a breeze to work with. My data flow got only complicated after introducing redux-observable.
  - Jenk 5y ago
    document.addEventListener("something", event => { /* blah */ }); is no different. Nor are Java streams or .NET linq.
    - vips7L 5y ago
      Java streams don’t infest your project. They also don’t throw away the error system of the language. They are also leagues more maintainable than a reactive project. Ignoring the maintenance issues, reactive applications do not yield better performance on realistic I/O-bound workloads: https://julien.ponge.org/blog/publication-performance-and-costs-of-reactive-programming-libraries-in-java/ https://julien.ponge.org/blog/publication-performance-and-co... So all you end up with is less maintainable code and more developer headache.
commandlinefan 5y ago
I feel the same way. I just get stuck on trying to understand what actual problem Angular is trying to solve. Like, ok, it's a framework but... a framework for what? Webapps? Javascript is a "framework" for webapps, too. When I first saw jQuery, I could understand the appeal, but Angular just seems like a lot of extra code for the sake of having extra code. (Like Spring...)
- checker 5y ago
  So you could certainly write your own component framework, state propagator, router, module framework, build engine, and more. But you'll probably find that, at the end of it all, you have a SPA framework you can share with us. If you're just doing simple web pages maybe you don't need all that, but some types of applications do.
- goto11 5y ago
  Angular is a framework for single-page applications, based on components with templates. If a property of a component changes, the rendering is automatically updated by the framework. This is supposed to free you from direct DOM manipulation and let you focus on the business logic. Angular is somewhat similar to React and other SPA-frameworks, but Angular takes more of a kitchen-sink approach and provide its own dependency injection framework, URL routing, HTTP client abstractions and so on. In comparison jQuery is just a library, it doesn't really care how you structure your application. jQuery makes it a lot easier to manipulate the DOM, but something like Angular is supposed to free you from having to manually touch the DOM in the first place. And JavaScript is a programming language, but you probably already know that.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > JavaScript is a programming language Ok, fair enough - JavaScript + DOM is a "framework" for creating webapps.
    - goto11 5y ago
      Yeah you can say that - the browser environment with DOM and other Wep API's is a framework for client-side apps. Single-page application frameworks like Angular, React etc. are frameworks on top of this, which provide higer-level abstractions and tools. Whether you need these higher level abstractions depend on your use case. If you have lots of in-page DOM mutation in response to user interaction or data from the server, a SPA framework might simplify things. For a site like HN with very little in-page DOM mutation it probably isn't worth the complexity.

by Jenk 5y ago

SilasX 5y ago

I tried to pick it up 5 years ago or so and my main barrier was that any tutorial, even the official Google ones, was long obsolete and their examples would fail out the gate ... but I guess that's to be expected of frameworks in tech.

neur4lnet 5y ago

Why do you think that is?

Jenk 5y ago
Honestly I'm not sure if there even is a big reason. The terminology doesn't feel right - I feel like I need to constantly remind myself what some of the terms mean compared to what I am used to, which I find occupies a tremendous amount of my cognitive capacity. "The tutorials are shit" doesn't help. They really suffer from the problem of the author expects the reader(s) to know what it is they are being taught ahead of time. "Tutorial 1: how to make a component. Step 1: Run `ng component <name>`. Now you have a component." type deal. Now I'm left to my own devices to find out what a component really is, etc. Another part is that it just isn't very exciting. I was/am more excited when using react or vue. I've been maintaining angular apps (albeit lightly) for nearly 2 years at my current role, but even here react is being introduced to replace it.

romanovcode 5y ago

I don't understand how can you not get Angular if you have .NET (assuming C#) "under your belt".

commandlinefan 5y ago
Not OP but feel the same way as OP... I can use Angular just fine, it just feels like I'm working around the Angular part trying to get down to the actual stuff I'm trying to program. Whenever I do use it, I spend most of the time thinking, "I could do this a lot faster in Javascript without Angular adding extra steps along the way..."

y4mi 5y ago

Are you really talking about angular or is it more about rxjs/observables ? Because the former is really hard to imagine with what you claim to be proficient in. The reactive stuff from rxjs is another story though, few people I know really worked with any of the reactive libraries before and mostly everyone I know struggled with the concepts at first, no matter which language they were using them in

vips7L 5y ago
One of my projects for work is RxJava and I’ll never touch anything Rx again. I don’t see any benefit it brings outside of making your project and control flow convoluted.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  That's unfortunate because reactive programming shines when you have continuous data flows and want to run pipelines against them; whether that's clicks, websocket events, queue items, etc.
- Offpics 5y ago
  I work with rxjs and its a breeze to work with. My data flow got only complicated after introducing redux-observable.
- Jenk 5y ago
  document.addEventListener("something", event => { /* blah */ }); is no different. Nor are Java streams or .NET linq.
  - vips7L 5y ago
    Java streams don’t infest your project. They also don’t throw away the error system of the language. They are also leagues more maintainable than a reactive project. Ignoring the maintenance issues, reactive applications do not yield better performance on realistic I/O-bound workloads: https://julien.ponge.org/blog/publication-performance-and-costs-of-reactive-programming-libraries-in-java/ https://julien.ponge.org/blog/publication-performance-and-co... So all you end up with is less maintainable code and more developer headache.

commandlinefan 5y ago

I feel the same way. I just get stuck on trying to understand what actual problem Angular is trying to solve. Like, ok, it's a framework but... a framework for what? Webapps? Javascript is a "framework" for webapps, too. When I first saw jQuery, I could understand the appeal, but Angular just seems like a lot of extra code for the sake of having extra code. (Like Spring...)

checker 5y ago
So you could certainly write your own component framework, state propagator, router, module framework, build engine, and more. But you'll probably find that, at the end of it all, you have a SPA framework you can share with us. If you're just doing simple web pages maybe you don't need all that, but some types of applications do.
goto11 5y ago
Angular is a framework for single-page applications, based on components with templates. If a property of a component changes, the rendering is automatically updated by the framework. This is supposed to free you from direct DOM manipulation and let you focus on the business logic. Angular is somewhat similar to React and other SPA-frameworks, but Angular takes more of a kitchen-sink approach and provide its own dependency injection framework, URL routing, HTTP client abstractions and so on. In comparison jQuery is just a library, it doesn't really care how you structure your application. jQuery makes it a lot easier to manipulate the DOM, but something like Angular is supposed to free you from having to manually touch the DOM in the first place. And JavaScript is a programming language, but you probably already know that.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > JavaScript is a programming language Ok, fair enough - JavaScript + DOM is a "framework" for creating webapps.
  - goto11 5y ago
    Yeah you can say that - the browser environment with DOM and other Wep API's is a framework for client-side apps. Single-page application frameworks like Angular, React etc. are frameworks on top of this, which provide higer-level abstractions and tools. Whether you need these higher level abstractions depend on your use case. If you have lots of in-page DOM mutation in response to user interaction or data from the server, a SPA framework might simplify things. For a site like HN with very little in-page DOM mutation it probably isn't worth the complexity.