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I'm kind of amazed Angular is still around. I hadn't heard of it for what feels like years at this point & assumed it was already in the graveyard. My company t

by rychco 4y ago

I'm kind of amazed Angular is still around. I hadn't heard of it for what feels like years at this point & assumed it was already in the graveyard. My company tried using it back in 2017ish but it was a pain for us at the time. Other than Google's own services, does anyone have any examples or experiences using Angular nowadays?

jmkni 4y ago
In the UK, there is no shortage of work for Angular contractors. Enterprise and Government are particularly keen on it.
pjmlp 4y ago
Yes, as Java/.NET shop, Angular is usually our first option for SPA applications, Vue second and then React third. This when we just don't just use SSR + vanilaJS/WebAPIs.
cjhowarddev 4y ago
I used Angular at my last company. After having used react for many years and then experimenting with svelte, Angular (even the most modern versions) felt like it was always in my way. Bi-directional data binding and the isolation between style, structure, and logic felt was less productive. Angular has some nice properties, like dependency injection built in, but you can circumvent many of those needs with a functional component tree in react (or limit the surface area across components). The simple fact that you need @Output event emitters to handle callbacks is a good example of how bloated it feels. It may be that I don't know nearly enough about Angular but even after a year of doing my best to learn the idiomatic Angular ways I wasn't impressed.
- Zetaphor 4y ago
  As someone who is now a couple years into using Angular after a number of years working with Vue (since 1.0) your observations are accurate. It doesn't really get any better as you become more familiar with the framework.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bergenty 4y ago
- shadowwillow 4y ago
  I have found it better practice to generally emit via a service BehaviorSubject that other components subscribe to rather than passing thru outputs and inputs generally speaking.
itslennysfault 4y ago
Yeah, a bunch of companies use it. It is still the 2nd most popular frontend framework. Off hand I know it's used heavily at: Google (duh), Microsoft, VMWare, Capitol One and Fidelity. I used it at Microsoft though there is also a ton of React there. I worked on PowerBI which is/was entirely Angular. The rest I just know from going to NgConf and seeing those other companies recruiting there.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > It is still the 2nd most popular frontend framework. Most popular. It still has more weekly downloads than Next on npm.
  - SebastianKra 4y ago
    No it isn't, no it doesn't https://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-vs-next https://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-vs-next
    - Alex3917 4y ago
      You have AngularJS up there, and React isn't a framework.
      - SebastianKra 4y ago
        My mistake on getting the wrong Angular package. Disqualifying React is disingenuous, as they are are still mutually exclusive options. But even excluding React, Angular is at best as popular as Vue.
yesimahuman 4y ago
Angular is very widely used in the enterprise, and I can confidently say that given we make most of our money at Ionic working directly with these enterprise teams. I think Angular has just found where it excels and that tends to be in larger companies.
- jmkni 4y ago
  I’m working with ionic at the moment on an Angular app, it’s brilliant
luisgvv 4y ago
The company I work on has a couple of projects built with Angular, however we are shifting to use React. The reason being: no one around the company likes maintaining those projects because they hate the framework and we haven't been able to hire people willing to learn/work with Angular. I love the framework as it has almost everything you need out of the box. At the beginning I hated it but as any tool/language once you get the architecture, patterns and ways to build stuff you feel it's a great tool.
- jcadam 4y ago
  When I see Angular in a job description, I think "this is a legacy maintenance job." So not surprised you have trouble hiring :).
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Even if they stereotypes aren’t true. They are still extremely damaging to the future of Angular. I also feel the same when the entire history of me hearing angular is of converting old angular 1 code to react.
- thm76 4y ago
  After having worked on an Angular project for a little over a year I'm at the point where I'm very unlikely to accept another job where they use Angular. It's so frustrating to work with, and every week I find another corner in the framework that, in my opinion, is very poorly designed and/or implemented.
maxfurman 4y ago
I've used it on a lot of client projects, my current one included. Angular's batteries-included approach makes it way faster to spin up a new app for a new project, and avoids the problem of picking the wrong dependency for (state/navigation/styling/etc.) that plagues React projects.
- WinstonSmith84 4y ago
  Next.js has finally solved React's mess But I can't agree more, Angular has for its whole existence of 10+ years always been more consistent. But it's not always about tech - Facebook's Marketing > Google's Marketing ...
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Good marketing in this space is also about leading by example and eating your dog food. Facebook used React internally before releasing it. Every new web front-end at Meta is written in React. They also had a convincing story of how the runtime expands beyond the web (React Native etc.) With Angular, you’d be hard-pressed to name a Google service built using it. It seems to be a framework created condescendingly for the ordinary others, not the Mountain View geniuses themselves. That’s not great marketing.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      The Google Cloud Console is the most notable Google service built with Angular and my experience is that's one of the best advertisements for not using Angular. If even Google engineers theoretically just offices away from the Angular team can't make a performant Angular app, who can? The Angular Team act like it's a great feature that they don't give "special" support to in-house dogfooding teams, but that just leaves as much an impression that they'd rather just support everyone equally bad. Sure "no special support" sounds great on paper, but it certainly looks like "no support at all" from where I'm standing. Some Angular proponents will also make excuses that the Google Cloud Console is an amalgamation of components and pages owned by a variety of different teams, like that's a unique situation to Google that no one else deals with bureaucratic scale like that. I guess they haven't experienced much other enterprise development, because that is very common in my experience. If they aren't building Angular for multi-team enterprise applications, what exactly are they building it for? (They are certainly advertising Angular as great for those, even if they are using it as an excuse for why Angular isn't performing well in Google's own usage of Angular.)
Zetaphor 4y ago
You're confusing your own experience for the reality of the market. My last three employers use Angular. My current employer just replaced an AngularJS app with a new Angular 11 app for a Fortune 100 client. Go to a job listing site and you'll find just as many positions hiring for an Angular dev (often paired with C#/ASP) as you will React.
- flakiness 4y ago
  FYI there is 10 Angular vs 99 React (# of word occurrences) in a recent "who's hiring" thread [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582796
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    It is probably biased towards startups vs mature enterprise.
  - n0us 4y ago
    Big corporations don't post in that thread
    - rhacker 4y ago
      The BigCorps I worked at used React.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - azemetre 4y ago
      Big corporations tend to copy what trendy tech companies do, and react dominates that market place. I haven’t look into too much but I’ve yet to see something like a boot camp even teach angular. It’s always react and friends.
      - 4y ago
ng12 4y ago
Angular is popular at places the HN crowd tends to not work at (banks, consulting, fortune whatevers). Not sure why that is.
- jmisavage 4y ago
  It’s extremely popular with C# and .Net developers. They’re more likely to work at those places.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I've worked at a shop largely split between .Net and Angular, so I can anecdotally confirm this. It makes a lot of sense given the enterprisey background.
  - thm76 4y ago
    Angular, to me, feels like it was designed by Java developers - classes and bloat* everywhere. Most code, when compared to a React etc. version, just seems like a wall of text on my screen. But, this might make it more approachable to developers that come from a Java background - I see this at my current employer. (*) By bloat I mean that I often feel like I should have been able to implement whatever feature I just implemented in half the amount of code.
- varrock 4y ago
  I've worked at a consulting firm as a dev where we used React for our all of our projects. Given the nature of the industry, we had a fairly high turnover rate with new devs constantly onboarding and older devs moving out. That, coupled with lack of engineering culture, resulted in our project architecture unfolding into what felt like a variety of different brain dumps in a codebase that was difficult to reason with. It's my opinion that Angular would have safeguarded those projects from a scattered architecture with its opinionated framework, and ultimately resulted in less overhead associated with onboarding new resources and getting them up to speed. The types of companies you listed aren't necessarily known as being engineering focused, and for a React project to really scale, I think that you need a good engineering culture to make that happen. Choosing Angular alleviates some of that work, and that's exactly what some companies need.
kylecordes 4y ago
You might be thinking of AngularJS 1.x, the older framework whose API looks pretty archaic nowadays. It was succeeded by Angular (versions 2 and up), which is very popular for large complex apps at large companies. I think React, in the form of Next and other frameworks built around React, have finally caught up with the reason that made it so: more stuff "in the box", with decisions already made and already working. If you have 200 Angular projects, there's a good chance developers can move between them without much difficulty. If you have 200 React projects, they might have 15 different combinations of selections for various accompanying libraries. This makes moving developers around harder (matters a lot in large organizations). For example, nearly every Angular project uses Angular's CSS isolation mechanism plus Sass for complexities on other axes. Whereas there are various popular CSS solutions that divvy the React user community among them. There are trade-offs, of course; Angular has so much in the box that so far nothing like Next (convention-based routing etc.) has sprung up around it. So I am quite bullish on React and Angular both - there will be lots of large important projects churning along with these in another decade, and beyond. Also important to remember that these are just the two most popular; there are a couple of hundred other competing SPA frameworks that work very well for their intended use cases.
- dSebastien 4y ago
  Wise words, as usual. Angular certainly has a lot of value for larger companies not interested in having big technical stack differences between projects and teams.
- jeremycarter 4y ago
  Great analysis! If only people would read this before jumping to conclusions.
Klaster_1 4y ago
The team I'm in uses Angular and used Angular.js before. The reasons are mostly historical, due to key developer's background. We never had any trouble finding people willing to work with it or who had prior experience. I have a hard time remembering a single instance of when the framework choice was a source of any issue, we'd be just as fine with Vue or React. Sure, Angular has a fair share of annoyances (who doesn't?), but these do get addressed, which is why the v14 feels like a step in the right direction - typed forms, less boilerplate, preliminary work for faster builds. In addition to these, my only gripes are with the router (ui-router was the best), not as big of a community compared to other frameworks and outdated testing tools that come out of the box. For SPAs, it does the job just fine.
bergenty 4y ago
Angular is very structurally regimented that makes it great for large complex applications used by large corporations, both for parallel work and maintenance.
mat0 4y ago
My last three jobs involved Angular. The second-to-last one was a very heavy application in the US healthcare space. Angular was perfect for that app. In conjunction with Rxjs / ngrx it was extremely powerful. I agree the learning curve was… steep. I don’t regret a minute of it. I moved to another company and I’m doing react now. I was actually hired to support the cash cow written in Angular, but now the company moved focus to full react and we are not hiring Angular devs anymore. React is fun though. I really enjoyed doing a deep dive with Hooks, but I would still work with Rxjs if I could
mdaniel 4y ago
I believe the AWS console uses, or used?, angular, as one can see the ng-* attributes on their elements but I wasn't able to readily find a specific file to confirm or deny that's still the case
- mdaniel 4y ago
  I was looking for an RSS feed in the page source and noticed that the aws-docs site(s) uses angular: view-source:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2022/release-notes/relnotes.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2022/release-notes/relno... view-source:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Welcome.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Welcom...
veidr 4y ago
I work on a team that maintains a customer-facing web application that is built on Angular. It's been in production for the past six years. I think Angular not quite in "the graveyeard", but probably only because a lot of large organizations outside of Google have large code bases that are built on it. (Having said that, I forget who they are — VMWare and CapitalOne and such, maybe?) Still, it is definitely not a hot technology any more (if it ever was... I think the botched "upgrade" from the old "AngularJS" to the (completely different, almost a repudiation of a lot of the core ideas of the original) "Angular" framework shed a lot of users, so maybe Angular was never actually "hot" to begin with). I definitely wouldn't start any new project using Angular, except in one specific circumstance: you have a large (relative to the size of your development team) body of existing software that uses Angular. Then, you might want to share components and libraries across apps, and also leverage the skills of your existing Angular-using team. I do find it somewhat harder to hire for roles specific to Angular development (I think because not many people want to learn it), and I also note that deep Angular knowledge isn't likely to be that helpful when looking for a new job, either. It counts for something, sure, but experience with React is far more sought after, and even Vue or Svelte is likely to be a little more useful. Angular isn't horribly less capable than those frameworks — it does a lot for you, makes things like accessibility easy^W possible, is TypeScript-based which is overall a big win IMO — but there is, and has been, just too much fuckery around the edges. I don't think Angular is really keeping up; I'd say it has been slowly falling even further behind the general state of the art. The rollout of Ivy (its new, more performant rendering engine) was a multi-year boondoggle. It was late, it was painful to migrate to, third-party libraries still haven't really migrated so you still have problems/annoyances using those, and it sucked all their resources away from other important aspects like the Angular Language Service — so we didn't have good completion and linting in editors like VS Code, for quite a long time. There was also nobody left to fix the testing story. They finally killed off Protractor, their bespoke E2E test monstrosity, after years of letting it languish, but the testing situation with Angular is still really mediocre and sub-par. Modern E2E frameworks like Playwright or Cypress support "component testing" (test components without rendering your whole app) for React and other frameworks out of the box, but not Angular. AFAICT that is because Angular has this weird "NgModule" system where you construct these Angular-specific module things, and then they can import other Angular-specific module things... so rendering a component is not at all simple. The Angular team seems to be trying to make this optional, and Angular co-founder Igor Minar tweeted some "NgModule becoming optional soon, I think!" kind of teaser... before he left the Angular team and Google. That was several months ago at least; I also think he was the last founder to leave, so there are none left if I am not mistaken. The i18n story recently finally upgraded to 'meh', after several years of being 'ugh'. The DX is objectively bad — builds are very slow. There was some talk of taking the type checking out of band, so that it would still happen, but not block the edit-and-re-render iteration loop — but that hasn't happened. So in a non-trivial project that loop (which is typically the main loop) is slow. Angular does do a lot for you, but in order to do so it monkey-patches DOM to hell and back — every async operation is monkey-patched so that it can do automagic change detection. That works great except when it doesn't work or when it makes things super slow, and it also makes debugging kind of nightmarish IMO — you end up in this 100s-of-frames-deep call stacks going through the zone.js async operation interception library. They are trying to make zone.js optional, too — or maybe it's technically optional now, but not really as a matter of practice. TL;DR — Angular works okay, but after working with it in production for the last several years, I'd say is pretty mediocre; C- would not use again
pleb_nz 4y ago
You're in a bubble. It's used tonnes

by rychco 4y ago

jmkni 4y ago

In the UK, there is no shortage of work for Angular contractors. Enterprise and Government are particularly keen on it.

pjmlp 4y ago

Yes, as Java/.NET shop, Angular is usually our first option for SPA applications, Vue second and then React third. This when we just don't just use SSR + vanilaJS/WebAPIs.

cjhowarddev 4y ago

I used Angular at my last company. After having used react for many years and then experimenting with svelte, Angular (even the most modern versions) felt like it was always in my way. Bi-directional data binding and the isolation between style, structure, and logic felt was less productive. Angular has some nice properties, like dependency injection built in, but you can circumvent many of those needs with a functional component tree in react (or limit the surface area across components). The simple fact that you need @Output event emitters to handle callbacks is a good example of how bloated it feels. It may be that I don't know nearly enough about Angular but even after a year of doing my best to learn the idiomatic Angular ways I wasn't impressed.

Zetaphor 4y ago
As someone who is now a couple years into using Angular after a number of years working with Vue (since 1.0) your observations are accurate. It doesn't really get any better as you become more familiar with the framework.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bergenty 4y ago
shadowwillow 4y ago
I have found it better practice to generally emit via a service BehaviorSubject that other components subscribe to rather than passing thru outputs and inputs generally speaking.

itslennysfault 4y ago

Yeah, a bunch of companies use it. It is still the 2nd most popular frontend framework. Off hand I know it's used heavily at: Google (duh), Microsoft, VMWare, Capitol One and Fidelity. I used it at Microsoft though there is also a ton of React there. I worked on PowerBI which is/was entirely Angular. The rest I just know from going to NgConf and seeing those other companies recruiting there.

Alex3917 4y ago
> It is still the 2nd most popular frontend framework. Most popular. It still has more weekly downloads than Next on npm.
- SebastianKra 4y ago
  No it isn't, no it doesn't https://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-vs-next https://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-vs-next
  - Alex3917 4y ago
    You have AngularJS up there, and React isn't a framework.
    - SebastianKra 4y ago
      My mistake on getting the wrong Angular package. Disqualifying React is disingenuous, as they are are still mutually exclusive options. But even excluding React, Angular is at best as popular as Vue.

yesimahuman 4y ago

Angular is very widely used in the enterprise, and I can confidently say that given we make most of our money at Ionic working directly with these enterprise teams. I think Angular has just found where it excels and that tends to be in larger companies.

jmkni 4y ago
I’m working with ionic at the moment on an Angular app, it’s brilliant

luisgvv 4y ago

The company I work on has a couple of projects built with Angular, however we are shifting to use React. The reason being: no one around the company likes maintaining those projects because they hate the framework and we haven't been able to hire people willing to learn/work with Angular. I love the framework as it has almost everything you need out of the box. At the beginning I hated it but as any tool/language once you get the architecture, patterns and ways to build stuff you feel it's a great tool.

jcadam 4y ago
When I see Angular in a job description, I think "this is a legacy maintenance job." So not surprised you have trouble hiring :).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Even if they stereotypes aren’t true. They are still extremely damaging to the future of Angular. I also feel the same when the entire history of me hearing angular is of converting old angular 1 code to react.
thm76 4y ago
After having worked on an Angular project for a little over a year I'm at the point where I'm very unlikely to accept another job where they use Angular. It's so frustrating to work with, and every week I find another corner in the framework that, in my opinion, is very poorly designed and/or implemented.

maxfurman 4y ago

I've used it on a lot of client projects, my current one included. Angular's batteries-included approach makes it way faster to spin up a new app for a new project, and avoids the problem of picking the wrong dependency for (state/navigation/styling/etc.) that plagues React projects.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago
Next.js has finally solved React's mess But I can't agree more, Angular has for its whole existence of 10+ years always been more consistent. But it's not always about tech - Facebook's Marketing > Google's Marketing ...
- pavlov 4y ago
  Good marketing in this space is also about leading by example and eating your dog food. Facebook used React internally before releasing it. Every new web front-end at Meta is written in React. They also had a convincing story of how the runtime expands beyond the web (React Native etc.) With Angular, you’d be hard-pressed to name a Google service built using it. It seems to be a framework created condescendingly for the ordinary others, not the Mountain View geniuses themselves. That’s not great marketing.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    The Google Cloud Console is the most notable Google service built with Angular and my experience is that's one of the best advertisements for not using Angular. If even Google engineers theoretically just offices away from the Angular team can't make a performant Angular app, who can? The Angular Team act like it's a great feature that they don't give "special" support to in-house dogfooding teams, but that just leaves as much an impression that they'd rather just support everyone equally bad. Sure "no special support" sounds great on paper, but it certainly looks like "no support at all" from where I'm standing. Some Angular proponents will also make excuses that the Google Cloud Console is an amalgamation of components and pages owned by a variety of different teams, like that's a unique situation to Google that no one else deals with bureaucratic scale like that. I guess they haven't experienced much other enterprise development, because that is very common in my experience. If they aren't building Angular for multi-team enterprise applications, what exactly are they building it for? (They are certainly advertising Angular as great for those, even if they are using it as an excuse for why Angular isn't performing well in Google's own usage of Angular.)

Zetaphor 4y ago

You're confusing your own experience for the reality of the market. My last three employers use Angular. My current employer just replaced an AngularJS app with a new Angular 11 app for a Fortune 100 client. Go to a job listing site and you'll find just as many positions hiring for an Angular dev (often paired with C#/ASP) as you will React.

flakiness 4y ago
FYI there is 10 Angular vs 99 React (# of word occurrences) in a recent "who's hiring" thread [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582796
- riku_iki 4y ago
  It is probably biased towards startups vs mature enterprise.
- n0us 4y ago
  Big corporations don't post in that thread
  - rhacker 4y ago
    The BigCorps I worked at used React.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Big corporations tend to copy what trendy tech companies do, and react dominates that market place. I haven’t look into too much but I’ve yet to see something like a boot camp even teach angular. It’s always react and friends.
    - 4y ago

ng12 4y ago

Angular is popular at places the HN crowd tends to not work at (banks, consulting, fortune whatevers). Not sure why that is.

jmisavage 4y ago
It’s extremely popular with C# and .Net developers. They’re more likely to work at those places.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I've worked at a shop largely split between .Net and Angular, so I can anecdotally confirm this. It makes a lot of sense given the enterprisey background.
- thm76 4y ago
  Angular, to me, feels like it was designed by Java developers - classes and bloat* everywhere. Most code, when compared to a React etc. version, just seems like a wall of text on my screen. But, this might make it more approachable to developers that come from a Java background - I see this at my current employer. (*) By bloat I mean that I often feel like I should have been able to implement whatever feature I just implemented in half the amount of code.
varrock 4y ago
I've worked at a consulting firm as a dev where we used React for our all of our projects. Given the nature of the industry, we had a fairly high turnover rate with new devs constantly onboarding and older devs moving out. That, coupled with lack of engineering culture, resulted in our project architecture unfolding into what felt like a variety of different brain dumps in a codebase that was difficult to reason with. It's my opinion that Angular would have safeguarded those projects from a scattered architecture with its opinionated framework, and ultimately resulted in less overhead associated with onboarding new resources and getting them up to speed. The types of companies you listed aren't necessarily known as being engineering focused, and for a React project to really scale, I think that you need a good engineering culture to make that happen. Choosing Angular alleviates some of that work, and that's exactly what some companies need.

kylecordes 4y ago

You might be thinking of AngularJS 1.x, the older framework whose API looks pretty archaic nowadays. It was succeeded by Angular (versions 2 and up), which is very popular for large complex apps at large companies. I think React, in the form of Next and other frameworks built around React, have finally caught up with the reason that made it so: more stuff "in the box", with decisions already made and already working. If you have 200 Angular projects, there's a good chance developers can move between them without much difficulty. If you have 200 React projects, they might have 15 different combinations of selections for various accompanying libraries. This makes moving developers around harder (matters a lot in large organizations). For example, nearly every Angular project uses Angular's CSS isolation mechanism plus Sass for complexities on other axes. Whereas there are various popular CSS solutions that divvy the React user community among them. There are trade-offs, of course; Angular has so much in the box that so far nothing like Next (convention-based routing etc.) has sprung up around it. So I am quite bullish on React and Angular both - there will be lots of large important projects churning along with these in another decade, and beyond. Also important to remember that these are just the two most popular; there are a couple of hundred other competing SPA frameworks that work very well for their intended use cases.

dSebastien 4y ago
Wise words, as usual. Angular certainly has a lot of value for larger companies not interested in having big technical stack differences between projects and teams.
jeremycarter 4y ago
Great analysis! If only people would read this before jumping to conclusions.

Klaster_1 4y ago

The team I'm in uses Angular and used Angular.js before. The reasons are mostly historical, due to key developer's background. We never had any trouble finding people willing to work with it or who had prior experience. I have a hard time remembering a single instance of when the framework choice was a source of any issue, we'd be just as fine with Vue or React. Sure, Angular has a fair share of annoyances (who doesn't?), but these do get addressed, which is why the v14 feels like a step in the right direction - typed forms, less boilerplate, preliminary work for faster builds. In addition to these, my only gripes are with the router (ui-router was the best), not as big of a community compared to other frameworks and outdated testing tools that come out of the box. For SPAs, it does the job just fine.

bergenty 4y ago

Angular is very structurally regimented that makes it great for large complex applications used by large corporations, both for parallel work and maintenance.

mat0 4y ago

My last three jobs involved Angular. The second-to-last one was a very heavy application in the US healthcare space. Angular was perfect for that app. In conjunction with Rxjs / ngrx it was extremely powerful. I agree the learning curve was… steep. I don’t regret a minute of it. I moved to another company and I’m doing react now. I was actually hired to support the cash cow written in Angular, but now the company moved focus to full react and we are not hiring Angular devs anymore. React is fun though. I really enjoyed doing a deep dive with Hooks, but I would still work with Rxjs if I could

mdaniel 4y ago

I believe the AWS console uses, or used?, angular, as one can see the ng-* attributes on their elements but I wasn't able to readily find a specific file to confirm or deny that's still the case

mdaniel 4y ago
I was looking for an RSS feed in the page source and noticed that the aws-docs site(s) uses angular: view-source:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2022/release-notes/relnotes.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2022/release-notes/relno... view-source:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Welcome.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Welcom...

veidr 4y ago

I work on a team that maintains a customer-facing web application that is built on Angular. It's been in production for the past six years. I think Angular not quite in "the graveyeard", but probably only because a lot of large organizations outside of Google have large code bases that are built on it. (Having said that, I forget who they are — VMWare and CapitalOne and such, maybe?) Still, it is definitely not a hot technology any more (if it ever was... I think the botched "upgrade" from the old "AngularJS" to the (completely different, almost a repudiation of a lot of the core ideas of the original) "Angular" framework shed a lot of users, so maybe Angular was never actually "hot" to begin with). I definitely wouldn't start any new project using Angular, except in one specific circumstance: you have a large (relative to the size of your development team) body of existing software that uses Angular. Then, you might want to share components and libraries across apps, and also leverage the skills of your existing Angular-using team. I do find it somewhat harder to hire for roles specific to Angular development (I think because not many people want to learn it), and I also note that deep Angular knowledge isn't likely to be that helpful when looking for a new job, either. It counts for something, sure, but experience with React is far more sought after, and even Vue or Svelte is likely to be a little more useful. Angular isn't horribly less capable than those frameworks — it does a lot for you, makes things like accessibility easy^W possible, is TypeScript-based which is overall a big win IMO — but there is, and has been, just too much fuckery around the edges. I don't think Angular is really keeping up; I'd say it has been slowly falling even further behind the general state of the art. The rollout of Ivy (its new, more performant rendering engine) was a multi-year boondoggle. It was late, it was painful to migrate to, third-party libraries still haven't really migrated so you still have problems/annoyances using those, and it sucked all their resources away from other important aspects like the Angular Language Service — so we didn't have good completion and linting in editors like VS Code, for quite a long time. There was also nobody left to fix the testing story. They finally killed off Protractor, their bespoke E2E test monstrosity, after years of letting it languish, but the testing situation with Angular is still really mediocre and sub-par. Modern E2E frameworks like Playwright or Cypress support "component testing" (test components without rendering your whole app) for React and other frameworks out of the box, but not Angular. AFAICT that is because Angular has this weird "NgModule" system where you construct these Angular-specific module things, and then they can import other Angular-specific module things... so rendering a component is not at all simple. The Angular team seems to be trying to make this optional, and Angular co-founder Igor Minar tweeted some "NgModule becoming optional soon, I think!" kind of teaser... before he left the Angular team and Google. That was several months ago at least; I also think he was the last founder to leave, so there are none left if I am not mistaken. The i18n story recently finally upgraded to 'meh', after several years of being 'ugh'. The DX is objectively bad — builds are very slow. There was some talk of taking the type checking out of band, so that it would still happen, but not block the edit-and-re-render iteration loop — but that hasn't happened. So in a non-trivial project that loop (which is typically the main loop) is slow. Angular does do a lot for you, but in order to do so it monkey-patches DOM to hell and back — every async operation is monkey-patched so that it can do automagic change detection. That works great except when it doesn't work or when it makes things super slow, and it also makes debugging kind of nightmarish IMO — you end up in this 100s-of-frames-deep call stacks going through the zone.js async operation interception library. They are trying to make zone.js optional, too — or maybe it's technically optional now, but not really as a matter of practice. TL;DR — Angular works okay, but after working with it in production for the last several years, I'd say is pretty mediocre; C- would not use again

pleb_nz 4y ago

You're in a bubble. It's used tonnes