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> If the measure of success for a JavaScript framework is popularity, Google Closure has failed miserably. It's old, unsexy, and has missed its turn on the hype
by mcherm 11y ago
> If the measure of success for a JavaScript framework is popularity, Google Closure has failed miserably. It's old, unsexy, and has missed its turn on the hype train. Google spends no effort on PR for the library, and seems content with it quietly powering the majority of its flagship applications. And given that, the lack of hype has mattered very little to us, as it's been a very good solution to our problems over the past five years.
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> That's not to say that adoption doesn't matter. The absence of a rich community around Google Closure has been disappointing. Only a single book on Google Closure has been published, and the surrounding tools have been slow to evolve. Contrast this with Angular, which has achieved off-the-charts hype and has developed a massive community despite minimal usage in production Google applications. Many books and countless blog posts have been authored explaining various patterns and concepts, making it much easier to get started.
And that is the cost of operating in a secretive, closed fashion as Google does.
- schmichael 11y agoHas Angular operated in a more open fashion than Closure did?
- LocalPCGuy 11y agoAngular is entirely open-source, all of the meeting notes are public (maybe the meetings also, not sure). They actively engage and welcome community participation.
- taylorhughes 11y agoAngular is also a Google library.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 11y agoSometimes that's exactly what you want, though. If you're deriving a competitive advantage from a tool, it's often to your advantage for as few people to know about it as possible. That's why Google kept it secret and internal-only for the first 5 years of its existence, and only open-sourced it once the hype train had moved on to other technologies.
- reagency 11y agoBut in those 5 years industry passed it by and now Google is crippled by legacy technology. Compare to Guava Java, which also powers Google, is open source, and is still best in class today after many years
- nostrademons 11y agoWell, the same thing happened to many of the more open, hype-laden technologies. JQuery and Angular are both also obsolete, and the new hotness is React, with Google trying to get in on the action again with Polymer but so far uptake seems limited. I also wouldn't say "crippled" - I worked with Closure on both Google Search and Google Plus, and while I certainly wouldn't use it for a startup, it's much better than all of JQuery/Angular/React for a 50+ person team. Guava is in a much different position. As a fundamental class library, it's much more deeply embedded in your code than a front-end framework, and so switching costs are much higher. You could also argue that Java as a whole is "crippling legacy technology", with newer apps being written in Go, Node.js, Ruby, Python, and hopefully soon Rust.
- OmarIsmail 11y agoCan you give some more information on why Closure is better than React for large teams and why Closure wouldn't be good for a startup?
- nostrademons 11y agoClosure is much more tightly typed and namespaced, it has a larger library of pre-built components, it bans (via compiler warnings) practices that are hard to maintain, and it errs toward verboseness. All of these improve the readability of code at the expense of its writability. In a large established organization, you read code much more than you write it. In a startup, you write it much more frequently than you read it.
- hokkos 11y ago