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I don't like Angular. Everybody likes it but I don't. It feels like 2004 all over again. SOAP! SOAP! XML! GWT! ColdFusion!!!!1onene!!!1 I also don't like work

I don't like Angular. Everybody likes it but I don't. It feels like 2004 all over again. SOAP! SOAP! XML! GWT! ColdFusion!!!!1onene!!!1 I also don't like working with Google toolchain, because for a company full of smartest dudes on the planet it certainly seems like these dudes don't care about their customers. Below is a list of reasons why I dislike Angular. 1. GAE documentation sucks, GoLang documentation sucks and indeed Angular documentation sucks. 2. By using Angular you are throwing away the toolchain we have been honing and making better for the last fifteen years. 3. Debugging - If I have learned anything from the XML dark ages it is that you do not want to program in a language that is not debuggable. And yet, here comes Google and does it again! 4. Overloading semantics. I hate Angular for just going and reinventing so many of the words and context we use in this trade. 5. Angular is not free! I would not use Angular for the same reason I would not use Java. I would hate to tie my future to this uber monstrous corporation's whims. Thinking about Angular I realized (yet again!) that Google has jumped the shark. It is no longer pragmatic and cheeky startup of fifteen years ago. Nowadays it is more akin IBM and Microsoft of old. Edit: Basically to me Angular is another stab at the softcoding - where Angular is the app and your code is softcoded definitions of behaviors. And as such it will eventually fail for the same reasons all the similar projects have done so before. Some of which are listed above.

wiradikusuma 12y ago
Err.. 1. I admit Angular documentation sucks, but that's not atypical in any open source. It's getting way better btw, and there are tons of resources from 3rd party. 2. Which toolchain are you referring to? If we're talking Web/JavaScript (where Angular is for), I can say the toolchain e.g. Grunt is quite recent. 3. I somewhat agree with this. We can use e.g. Chrome Dev tools and Batarang (Angular Chrome plugin), but definitely there's room for improvements. 5. Care to elaborate your definition of free? Even for Java, I can say a significant ecosystem for Java is open source. Sure, some Enterprise prefer Java Enterprise Edition, but many are satisfied with Spring and other open source Java-based solutions.
- JanezStupar 12y ago
  2. Templates and existing JavaScript code - i.e. Bootstrap, jQuery, templating languages and other existing app components. With Backbone you can easily use any JavaScript library - because it itself is just JavaScript. I really don't like how angular forces everything to have a ng-something derivative. 5. Angular is not free because it is this monolyth that only the sage men within the temple of G can comprehend. The sages give you an incantation for a ritual and you, the believer use it. If it is not yet, then its core is going to become an indecipherable mess - built to serve the temple of G. Google is building it for itself and as usual doesn't really care about anything but its own objectives. Whatever they may be - a user might find itself in the same situation that i.e. Silverlight users found themselves after MS decided that Silverlight was not a good idea at all.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    2. Nothing's stopping anyone from using 3rd party libraries within an AngularJS application - using React for the view layer, for example. Angular encourages the use to separate concerns (mainly DOM manipulation) via directives, instead of mixing that logic into other parts of your application (like vanilla JS, jQuery and Backbone tend to do). 5. You're wrong, and your argument is invalid. It's open source, legible, modular and fully comprehensible if anyone bothers to dive into it.
hellodevnull 12y ago
Reasons 1 and 3 are enough for me to stop someone who is relatively new to web app development to use something other than Angular. egghead.io saved me when trying to learn it, but before that I was stuck trying to follow their tutorials and docs (which understand are a little better today) and spending hours each day trying to figure out problems - this wasn't the case with Ember and Backbone just for a persona comparison there.
ctolsen 12y ago
I'm honestly curious here – not being an FE developer, but I've wired up Angular in a few projects in the recent past. I've felt like it's easy to use and to get the job done, not any harder to debug than JS in general, that it wasn't that hard to fiddle with it to a point where I could use my old plain-JS knowledge fairly well, that the documentation wasn't excellent but not bad, and that the online error generation (whatever it's name is) was quite handy. What haven't I seen yet? I mean, it seems to have its quirks and difficulties that make me go halfway insane, but that's a characteristic of JS development in general.
wldlyinaccurate 12y ago
I may be biased, since I've been using (and enjoying) Angular for quite some time now. But I don't agree with any of your points. 1. I can't think of a single case where the Angular documentation has failed me. Yes, it's sketchy in places, but what open source documentation isn't? 2. I'm not sure which toolchain you're referring to, but Angular is just a framework - you can use whichever toolchain you like. You can even use no toolchain if you wish. 3. Debugging has improved significantly since 1.0, especially since Angular started adding HTML comments to denote where markup is generated from. Browser extensions like AngularJS Batarang and ng-inspector help out as well. 4. Again, I don't know exactly what you're referring to here, but I feel like Angular's concepts and semantics fit in just fine with other systems. Scopes, services, controllers, modules... These all mean what you think they mean. 5. I'm genuinely interested how you think using an open-source JS framework will tie you to a corporation? Hell, I'm interested how using Java will tie you to (I assume) Oracle when things like OpenJDK exist?
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
1. GAE and GoLang is neither here nor there; Angular's documentation was in need of a lot of improvement when I started using it a year ago, but since then they've been working hard on it. (I found myself in the list of contributors actually, all I did was make a small edit to the documentation). If the documentation sucks - and you seem to know what's wrong with it - edit it. There's a big shiny "IMPROVE THIS DOC" button on every documentation page. 2. As others mentioned, what toolchain? At my current project we've got the ol' Grunt toolchain set up, generated by Yeoman, and customized to our needs - no Google involvement there, and it's a massive improvement over the old toolchain, which was an assortiment of tools run from Maven (often in the old Java JS runtime, which was slow) 3. I've yet to encounter any issue in our Angular projects that need debugging; writing proper unit tests (and Angular allows that) and not doing crazy stuff helps a lot in that respect. 4. Such as? Every framework introduces its own semantics; before, I used Backbone, which has routers (which were actually controllers), models and collections (where collections were a subset of models containing models, what?), and views (which often served as controllers as well, creating the ViewController thing). I don't see your point. 5. Yes it is. MIT license, open source, hosted on Github - the comparison with Java probably couldn't be more skewed. The comparison with other frameworks is somewhat relevant, in that it's a full-scale application framework - not jQuery with a structure layer on top like for example Backbone is. The upsides of that is that it's much easier to achieve the same thing (trust me, I'm rebuilding a 60K Backbone project in Angular with a factor 10 less code required), it's much easier to develop, test and maintain (and with a 12-man development team of varying skill levels you need that), etc. Not to mention, like I said, unlike ColdFusion or Java or Silverlight or whatever, it's an open source project from the start - not something ditched to the community after the company itself lost interest.

wiradikusuma 12y ago

Err.. 1. I admit Angular documentation sucks, but that's not atypical in any open source. It's getting way better btw, and there are tons of resources from 3rd party. 2. Which toolchain are you referring to? If we're talking Web/JavaScript (where Angular is for), I can say the toolchain e.g. Grunt is quite recent. 3. I somewhat agree with this. We can use e.g. Chrome Dev tools and Batarang (Angular Chrome plugin), but definitely there's room for improvements. 5. Care to elaborate your definition of free? Even for Java, I can say a significant ecosystem for Java is open source. Sure, some Enterprise prefer Java Enterprise Edition, but many are satisfied with Spring and other open source Java-based solutions.

JanezStupar 12y ago
2. Templates and existing JavaScript code - i.e. Bootstrap, jQuery, templating languages and other existing app components. With Backbone you can easily use any JavaScript library - because it itself is just JavaScript. I really don't like how angular forces everything to have a ng-something derivative. 5. Angular is not free because it is this monolyth that only the sage men within the temple of G can comprehend. The sages give you an incantation for a ritual and you, the believer use it. If it is not yet, then its core is going to become an indecipherable mess - built to serve the temple of G. Google is building it for itself and as usual doesn't really care about anything but its own objectives. Whatever they may be - a user might find itself in the same situation that i.e. Silverlight users found themselves after MS decided that Silverlight was not a good idea at all.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  2. Nothing's stopping anyone from using 3rd party libraries within an AngularJS application - using React for the view layer, for example. Angular encourages the use to separate concerns (mainly DOM manipulation) via directives, instead of mixing that logic into other parts of your application (like vanilla JS, jQuery and Backbone tend to do). 5. You're wrong, and your argument is invalid. It's open source, legible, modular and fully comprehensible if anyone bothers to dive into it.

hellodevnull 12y ago

Reasons 1 and 3 are enough for me to stop someone who is relatively new to web app development to use something other than Angular. egghead.io saved me when trying to learn it, but before that I was stuck trying to follow their tutorials and docs (which understand are a little better today) and spending hours each day trying to figure out problems - this wasn't the case with Ember and Backbone just for a persona comparison there.

ctolsen 12y ago

I'm honestly curious here – not being an FE developer, but I've wired up Angular in a few projects in the recent past. I've felt like it's easy to use and to get the job done, not any harder to debug than JS in general, that it wasn't that hard to fiddle with it to a point where I could use my old plain-JS knowledge fairly well, that the documentation wasn't excellent but not bad, and that the online error generation (whatever it's name is) was quite handy. What haven't I seen yet? I mean, it seems to have its quirks and difficulties that make me go halfway insane, but that's a characteristic of JS development in general.

wldlyinaccurate 12y ago

I may be biased, since I've been using (and enjoying) Angular for quite some time now. But I don't agree with any of your points. 1. I can't think of a single case where the Angular documentation has failed me. Yes, it's sketchy in places, but what open source documentation isn't? 2. I'm not sure which toolchain you're referring to, but Angular is just a framework - you can use whichever toolchain you like. You can even use no toolchain if you wish. 3. Debugging has improved significantly since 1.0, especially since Angular started adding HTML comments to denote where markup is generated from. Browser extensions like AngularJS Batarang and ng-inspector help out as well. 4. Again, I don't know exactly what you're referring to here, but I feel like Angular's concepts and semantics fit in just fine with other systems. Scopes, services, controllers, modules... These all mean what you think they mean. 5. I'm genuinely interested how you think using an open-source JS framework will tie you to a corporation? Hell, I'm interested how using Java will tie you to (I assume) Oracle when things like OpenJDK exist?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

1. GAE and GoLang is neither here nor there; Angular's documentation was in need of a lot of improvement when I started using it a year ago, but since then they've been working hard on it. (I found myself in the list of contributors actually, all I did was make a small edit to the documentation). If the documentation sucks - and you seem to know what's wrong with it - edit it. There's a big shiny "IMPROVE THIS DOC" button on every documentation page. 2. As others mentioned, what toolchain? At my current project we've got the ol' Grunt toolchain set up, generated by Yeoman, and customized to our needs - no Google involvement there, and it's a massive improvement over the old toolchain, which was an assortiment of tools run from Maven (often in the old Java JS runtime, which was slow) 3. I've yet to encounter any issue in our Angular projects that need debugging; writing proper unit tests (and Angular allows that) and not doing crazy stuff helps a lot in that respect. 4. Such as? Every framework introduces its own semantics; before, I used Backbone, which has routers (which were actually controllers), models and collections (where collections were a subset of models containing models, what?), and views (which often served as controllers as well, creating the ViewController thing). I don't see your point. 5. Yes it is. MIT license, open source, hosted on Github - the comparison with Java probably couldn't be more skewed. The comparison with other frameworks is somewhat relevant, in that it's a full-scale application framework - not jQuery with a structure layer on top like for example Backbone is. The upsides of that is that it's much easier to achieve the same thing (trust me, I'm rebuilding a 60K Backbone project in Angular with a factor 10 less code required), it's much easier to develop, test and maintain (and with a 12-man development team of varying skill levels you need that), etc. Not to mention, like I said, unlike ColdFusion or Java or Silverlight or whatever, it's an open source project from the start - not something ditched to the community after the company itself lost interest.