> Which brings me to the pattern of ever failing technologies. Remember Moo Tools? Prototype? ... Prototype and moo tools tried to be innovative, but they just made things harder. Not only were they not intuitive to use, but referring to the documentation was even worse. Would take hours what jQuery could accomplish in mere minutes.
That's just not true. I can't speak to MooTools, but I used Prototype back in the early Rails days, and it was a pleasure. Great documentation and it jived with the Rails automagical convention-over-configuration approach. Prototype failed because a) it stopped being actively developed, and b) it overrode native object prototypes in a way that could cause other libraries to catastrophically fail. But Prototype didn't fail because it wasn't intuitive, and it didn't fail because it wasn't documented. IIRC, Prototype documentation was actually better than jQuery documentation.
> The main reason Angular JS will fail is because it’s difficult.
This is fair criticism, but there's no supporting evidence provided—only that Angular JS didn't "feel" right and that more people search for "Angular sucks" than "jQuery sucks" on Google.
I think Angular got a lot of core ideas right: two-way binding and extending HTML. But it also comes with an extremely steep learning curve. The directive definition object, with its pre-compile, post-compile, pre-link, and post-link phases is too complex and exposes too many warts of using the DOM as a templating language. The documentation takes several passes to grok, and you'll more-than-once have to dig into Angular internals. The several ways to create a service (`.provider`, `.factory`, and the supremely confusingly `.service`) are unnecessary obfuscation and force you to use singletons; custom classes/prototypical inheritance in Angular requires some mind-bending use of first-class functions.
If you're not careful to fully understand Angular, it's easy for your first Angular app to turn into a mess of spaghetti, since Angular enforces too much awkward structure at the directive/controller levels, and not enough at the data management layer.
But these are issues that the Angular core team is well aware of. I'm really excited about the Angular 2.0 roadmap [0]. And even if Angular fails, some of its ideas are so good they're being incorporated into ES6, like Object.observe [1].
[0] http://blog.angularjs.org/2014/03/angular-20.html
[1] http://addyosmani.com/blog/the-future-of-data-binding-is-obj...