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Comment by rubiquity | Hacker News Reader

I thought Angular might be cool until my exposure to it consisted of inheriting someone else's project that uses Angular. Digging through HTML looking for ad-hoc HTML tags and wacky HTML attributes was an absolute nightmare. Finding these and then connecting them to the corresponding Angular code, which have the weirdest method signatures, was even worse.

I have a strong suspicion that all of these Angular diehards have never worked on someone else's Angular project.

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Admittedly, I do use Angular and I do love it. So take my comment with a grain of salt.

But from my perspective, I'd rather inherit a messy AngularJS project rather than a messy jQuery project. Or Backbone. With jQuery or Backbone, who knows what kind of stack they decided to use, or what kind of crazy hacks they implemented to get it to work? The same thing can happen in AngularJS, but at least it is more probable that they'll be relying on out-of-box tools for core functionality.

Now, I agree that in general, web software front end projects can be gross, but I find Angular to be the least gross solution.

It's very young, sophisticated to a fault, and there are lots of loose screws. There are lots of ways to use it wrong.

That said, I've worked with other people's angular code and I can't say that refactoring other people's implementations was a problem.

However I can see how a someone without a proper understanding could make a mess of things, particularly if they are also bad at TDD.

I can understand why you'd think of me as a Angular diehard, but I'm not. I try to choose the best tool for the job, and because of it's structure Angular was the best choice for this project. If Ember or Backbone had been more suited I would just as easily had a love affair with them too!

As for your bad experience, I can see how that can happen with Angular, but I can also see that happening in other ways with other libraries. In my opinion that is solved by using good code patterns and writing code for others, not for yourself. I'll leave this relevant quote:

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." - Martin Golding

Angular, Ember and Backbone are all MVCs. They're more or less different shapes and sizes of a hammer. You'd be missing saws, which can cut through all this, ahem, object oriented crap. And don't forget the simple tools, which can be composed any number of ways and don't make everything look like a nail.

I have...and I have seen some awful uses of Angular & fixed them for co-workers.

Angular isn't a cure-all for good application design. You can write bad Angular code as with anything else.

This is still a lot better than working on someone else's (or even your own!) jQuery-only project.

But not as simple as working on a project with data bindings that are just a template and an object, eg, ractive.

You mean how people use the data-attr to have scripts run after the page renders? Scary.

It sounds like inheriting a baddly written JSF project...

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