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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I was asked to use angular in a java job.

I was going crazy with all the files you need to have for a small project.

It's like all the horrible sides of OOP and abstraction, but on steroids.

I have the same problem with Angular that I have with Spring - nobody can actually articulate what problem these frameworks are trying to solve (other than the problem of there not being a framework?). They both feel like tons of overhead with zero actual functionality.

Modern Spring framework (annotation driven, no more XML config hell) offers a lot. Spring Boot is one of the easiest ways to start a backend Java app, microservice or monolith.

You get ORM, a web framework, dependency injection, messaging, and a whole lot more just by including the modules you want. You can learn the basics in an afternoon of reading documentation. The major IDEs have very good plugins.

A legacy Spring app can be absolute hell, though.

That said, Angular (1.x) was the worst professional experience of my life. It was the only technology I absolutely could not learn enough to get comfortable with, despite working with it daily for over 2 years. Non-stop banging my head against my desk. That job caused real depression, burnout, health problems.

> You get ORM, a web framework, dependency injection, messaging

But you can get all that stuff without Spring, too. And Spring adds another layer in between you and the ORM, the web framework and the messaging framework - a layer that's heavily reflection-based and makes a ton of undocumented assumptions about how things are set up and throws cryptic error messages when those assumptions are violated.

You certainly can, but it is like a mechanic buying sets of tools from many manufacturers. The Spring framework modules share a consistency of conventions and documentation that is itself valuable.

Like any opinionated framework, it's going to make assumptions that can cause headaches, but it's mature enough that most issues I run into are a Stack Overflow away.

I genuinely can't, after 20 years or so of trying, get my head around why people think that, but it seems like everybody except for me does think that, so I must be the one missing something.

I don't think Angular targets small projects, but enterprise projects.

> It's like all the horrible sides of OOP and abstraction, but on steroids.

Can you go more into detail?

I feel you. I have worked on an Angular project for over a year and was miserable working with it (and I _really_ tried to like it).

At first glance it seems "complete", but once you start building there's just so many insane edge cases that don't work well or have bugs. I also think that "integrating" RxJS was a mistake, while I get it and it's nice, it's imho too low level of an abstraction if you have many people that don't necessarily want to learn all the details (easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it), too different from anything else in JS, and too poorly integrated into angular.

And also the verbosity of everything.. was too much for me.

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