AngularUI project to improve AngularJS community quality
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Rewrite the docs. From scratch. They are dreadful.
I would like to help but every time I think I have understood angular, it turns out that no, I didn't. There was an undocumented feature that's well documented ... if you read the source code and have been subscribed to the mailing list for a year.
It would also be nice to have a consistent naming standard. For example, why do these two functions have inconsistent parameter names:
$watch( watchExpression, listener, objectEquality )
$watchCollection( obj, listener )
And then there's the confusing use of names. `objectEquality`? No: it's not a function that you pass in. It's a flag to watch-by-value instead of watch-by-reference. Why not call it `watchByValue` instead?
Unfortunately, poor documentation seems to be the fashion for JS projects. You're lucky if you get full parameter descriptions and return types for API functions. And the same for expected callback functions? Forgetaboutit.
Just because the language is dynamic doesn't mean APIs should be haphazardly documented.
Not only do I read the source and daily newsgroup digests to my preferred javascript stack, I read the source and newsgroups of the other popular choices. If I didn't know all the answers, i wouldn't be a very good tech lead, would I?
The ecosystem is moving at high velocity and that is a good thing.
I've actually become quite familiar with some parts of the Angular source. It's the only way I can make sense of the documentation.
This is not my dayjob. I am doing this because I recognise that front-end is one of my two biggest weaknesses. Right now I am making forward movement by headbutting. It seems unnecessarily like self-flagellation.
Sorry I don't get it. People blog about stuff they use, they always have, always will. The fact that blogs are inconsistent is just the symptom, warning sign even, one that reflects more on the state of AngularJS documentation and APIs than those who blog about it.
The problem to me seems to be both with the official documentation (or lack thereof) as well as inconsistencies in the design of Angular's APIs themselves which I find tend to lead people towards many different interpretations and implementations in practice.
The truth is part of this is simply the maturity of the project which is perhaps unavoidable but some part of it is that the Angular core team just does not seem to be taking documentation or at least clearly defining best practices as a very high priority. However I would argue it should be. At least equal to core development itself. If you don't first clearly define how you expect people to use your APIs then how can you really expect to design them in a way that is easy to understand and use?
The state of the Angular docs are unacceptable at the present time, and I just don't think crowdsourced solutions like those presented here are a sufficient solution. I can't think of (help me out here) any other examples where a high-quality open source project gets it's documentation completely from crowd sourced, after-the-fact, community edits. Good documentation has to be set as a standard. Sure lean on the community but please don't just expect to "build it and the community will write the docs" is going to work out.
We've been growing at a rate of about 100 subscribers a month, which is awesome. I think as we grow and continue to store everything in this one place, we'll have a good place for people looking to really dig into Angular to start at.