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I wish I could go back in time and strongly oppose AngularJS at the last place I worked. Knowing what I know now, it was such a bad idea. I also made the mist

I wish I could go back in time and strongly oppose AngularJS at the last place I worked. Knowing what I know now, it was such a bad idea. I also made the mistake of adding it to a resume, too, so I have gotten too many recruiter emails about AngularJS jobs. AngularJS has an amazing success/failure story. The developers have managed to get their technology used by so many web development teams whilst being extremely over-engineered and having a very steep learning curve. Why did so many of us get enamored with it in the first place? The power of Google?

woah 12y ago
The overengineering actually led to success, as it resulted in a batch of non-JS devs thinking that they had discovered some secret magic. They went on to write a bunch of blog posts, which made people think it was good.
- fixermark 12y ago
  Enabling non-JS devs to create a rich experience website (even if it has performance and future-proofing flexibility issues) is secret magic. Never underestimate the number of non-web engineers who desperately want to make browser-accessible frontends to their tools without having to learn the "hell" that is Javscript. I strongly suspect people were writing those blog posts because Angular worked for them in a way that alternatives had not; I hear that's how things get popular sometimes.
Svenstaro 12y ago
I agree with you on so many very painful levels. :/
tragic 12y ago
I don't think it does have a steep learning curve, really. I first tried it when I was a real greenhorn, having played around with backbone and ember and not really enjoyed the experience; with Angular you can be doing something cool in about 10 minutes. The weird terminology almost helps, especially if you're coming from a server-framework background where your Ms, Vs and Cs are pretty different (due to the difference between request/response and UI design) from the same terms in a client-side framework. I am not going to confuse $scope with an ActiveRecord model. Most of it, in any case, works a bit like this (or did for me when I was very junior) - 'if it has a dollar in front of it, it does Magic Stuff with little or no human intervention. No, the learning curve is very flat - until, as the OP says, you hit a brick wall. All that said, IME it is possible to properly organise code in an Angular app, get logic out of views and so on. But it is dependent on you knowing a bit about application design. The easy option is to turn scope into a god object and have a 500 line spaghetti controller.
serve_yay 12y ago
I have the same feeling, except there was actually no debating it. Everyone used the phrase that Angular is the future of web development, even the back-end .NET people who only play with JS when the fancy strikes. Even the product people. I didn't even try to mount a serious inquiry or evaluation - it was like an opinion steamroller. I really hated that feeling, but I was actually okay with the choice at the time because I wanted to learn Angular. I just remember being spooked by the total consensus that it was what we would use.

woah 12y ago

The overengineering actually led to success, as it resulted in a batch of non-JS devs thinking that they had discovered some secret magic. They went on to write a bunch of blog posts, which made people think it was good.

fixermark 12y ago
Enabling non-JS devs to create a rich experience website (even if it has performance and future-proofing flexibility issues) is secret magic. Never underestimate the number of non-web engineers who desperately want to make browser-accessible frontends to their tools without having to learn the "hell" that is Javscript. I strongly suspect people were writing those blog posts because Angular worked for them in a way that alternatives had not; I hear that's how things get popular sometimes.

Svenstaro 12y ago

I agree with you on so many very painful levels. :/

tragic 12y ago

I don't think it does have a steep learning curve, really. I first tried it when I was a real greenhorn, having played around with backbone and ember and not really enjoyed the experience; with Angular you can be doing something cool in about 10 minutes. The weird terminology almost helps, especially if you're coming from a server-framework background where your Ms, Vs and Cs are pretty different (due to the difference between request/response and UI design) from the same terms in a client-side framework. I am not going to confuse $scope with an ActiveRecord model. Most of it, in any case, works a bit like this (or did for me when I was very junior) - 'if it has a dollar in front of it, it does Magic Stuff with little or no human intervention. No, the learning curve is very flat - until, as the OP says, you hit a brick wall. All that said, IME it is possible to properly organise code in an Angular app, get logic out of views and so on. But it is dependent on you knowing a bit about application design. The easy option is to turn scope into a god object and have a 500 line spaghetti controller.

serve_yay 12y ago

I have the same feeling, except there was actually no debating it. Everyone used the phrase that Angular is the future of web development, even the back-end .NET people who only play with JS when the fancy strikes. Even the product people. I didn't even try to mount a serious inquiry or evaluation - it was like an opinion steamroller. I really hated that feeling, but I was actually okay with the choice at the time because I wanted to learn Angular. I just remember being spooked by the total consensus that it was what we would use.