Comment by abalashov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalashov | Hacker News Reader

I just stumbled onto Vue after disenchantment with the morbid obesity and tooling diarrhoea of Angular 2--itself a research project born of an increasing sense that Angular 1, bureaucratic enough in its own right, is being aggressively deprecated by these sociopaths. That's something that unfortunately has implications for all of us, including those who would just as well keep using Angular 1.x contentedly.

Vue is amazing! Everything that's good about Angular 1 but without the embellished boilerplate. One is free to use Vue in any way one wishes, from script tag include to complex Webpack get-ups. It has a surprisingly large ecosystem of third party UI components, including a great, no-nonsense state router. But fundamentally, one is free to architect one's app as one wishes without having to spend two years learning a bunch of meta-boilerplate and build-tools-for-build-tools just to get going.

And it lets one write plain old ES6, a luxury in this age of TypeScript fascism by psychopathic ex-JBoss villains. I love it! This is the perfect MVWW compromise I've been after, as a non web developer by trade!

Thank you, Evan! Amazing work, and great documentation! Thank you, thank you! I just became a $50/mo Patreon supporter. If I ever get wealthier, I'll increase it. And I haven't even used Vue for any production work yet. But that's how much I love it! I haven't loved something this way in probably a decade and a half. Almost every hipster.js novelty that comes across HN, big and small, makes me groan. This is the first thing of its kind about which I haven't felt that way.

This is going to be a highly successful venture. I know it. Godspeed!

> And it lets one write plain old ES6, a luxury in this age of TypeScript fascism by psychopathic ex-JBoss villains.

This opinion is one of the many things that are wrong with the JavaScript ecosystem today. Static typing as provided by TypeScript is a safety net, not "fascism".

Yes, but they completely undermine the appeal of JavaScript for getting things done quickly and easily for the JS-competent. If I wanted to write my JavaScript as bureaucratically as one writes Java or C#, I'd just use those languages.

Also, Angular 2 claims to be TS vs. ES6 agnostic, but practically, all documentation and resources are TS-orientated. That's more what I meant by fascism.

As far as the language premiums offered by TS: if I otherwise had to write ES5, I could see the value. With all the improvements offered by ES6—sure, type safety is not among them, but alas—I don't see any reason to use TS.

> getting things done quickly and easily

Sure, fast turnaround is good. Being able to maintain and refactor what you made a year later is even better. I'm currently refactoring an app that has ~30k sloc TypeScript, and doing it without types would be a lot worse.

However, my app is not built in Angular, so my experience here may be quite different.

I'll buy that. I'll also buy that the discipline of TS—like Java—is useful on large enterprise projects and/or on large teams, especially if the aim is to limit the amount of damage that can be done by ordinary J2EE H1Bs at Accenture.

But that's no reason to force its use as a precondition of using a notionally JS framework.

It's sort of sad that TS inspires comparisons to the bureaucratic, manifestly typed languages like the perennial Hacker News bashees C# and Java and not the graceful type inference of some functional languages. These languages being the face of strong static typing betray the ability of types to make a programming language both safer and more expressive.

I think it's a red herring. TS's typing isn't the only thing that is true about it, and is not the salient issue here. Were TS merely to force types upon me, I think I'd have few grievances with it.

Yes, yes, I know—it's (2.x) a superset of ES6. But just you try writing Angular 2 code in such "ES6". No, you have to play ball with generics and the full gamut of Java features.

I guess I don't understand why generics are "Java features?"

Generics are a pretty integral part of the type system, not a "Java feature". And TS has other good features besides types, e.g. transpiling to ES5, async/await, TSX, decorators. What does pure ES6 offer instead?

I am avoiding Angular entirely (I'm not a fan of the "and the kitchen sink" approach it promotes), so I can't comment if they're taking TS too far.

because it is closer to java or C# than it is to the more advanced functional languages.

Yeah, it has structural typing, some type inference and pinky swearing type guards. It is better in those regards. But you still don't get very far without annotations. C# had inference for anonymous objects and return values too, and TypeScript is only a little further ahead on that one.

Though the main problem with TS is how it actually gets used. You certainly CAN do java-like garbage with it, and god do people do. If you're not stuck with people doing that, it's not half bad.

It's just sort of a shame that TS is winning out over Flow. I remain convinced that the latter is better.

yup. Flow has a couple of annoying bugs (situations where the type checker ignores errors without warning you), and tooling and IDE integration is horrible. Plus windows support is still slow and buggy.

Flow is my favorite too, i much prefer its type system, but its no surprise its "losing".

> ordinary J2EE H1Bs at Accenture

you probably don't see that phrase in their marketing materials.

I don't see any reason not to use TypeScript as all of the type safety is totally optional depending on how you configure. So you can write freely but start adding types for critical pieces of code when it becomes worthwhile.

And because someone doesn't like TypeScript doesn't mean they are "one of the many things wrong with the JavaScript ecosystem today".

I don't disagree with your opinion, but calling them sociopaths, psychopaths, and villains is a bit strong.

Agreed. It's always very sad to see people who are utterly unwilling to imagine another person's perspective. A project like Angular might have made decisions you disagree with, but that doesn't mean the author is a sociopath. It just means you disagree with their perspective, which is not a fault of either person.

I would normally agree with both of you, but Angular 2 really is sociopathy. It's a wicked nightmare that could only be born of J2EE-type misanthropy. I don't choose that editorial posture lightly. Have you attempted to use Angular 2?

I'd rather impale myself on Spring and Hibernate2. 10,000 lines of malignant Maven and Ant XML tumour seem like a cakewalk by comparison.

FWIW, I enjoyed your hyperbole and I really think you weren't overstating things by that much. Angular 2 is a fundamental disaster in so many ways. The folks designing it have really jumped the shark and have made building webapps a lesson in masochism and self-flagellation.

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