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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

I don't care what people say Angular totally suffers from the second system effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

I definitely concur. Having just attended emberconf, there's a stark contrast in how each framework is choosing to evolve with the web. Personally, I favor ember's approach of smaller, more iterative releases that are largely backwards compatible with previous versions. It not only means that teams building ember apps now can continue their efforts with confidence, but it's also a testament to the amount of thought and care the core team has placed in developing ember's abstractions; no major rewrite needed (so far). And ember's version 2.0 due out next quarter will be no different; same release cycle, same emphasis on compatibility with the added benefit of removing cruft that has built up in the codebase.

Perhaps I'm speaking from the perspective of our products at Yahoo, but ember has suited us well for precisely these tenets.

--Sam

Thanks, Sam. Like all things in technology, there are tradeoffs to make and a cost-benefit analysis that every project will do differently. We spend a lot of time on backwards compatibility in Ember, but my goodness, it's painful.

Recently, the results of the Ember Community Survey were released and the aspect of it I'm most proud of is the number of developers who are using the latest release version[1]. The majority of respondents were on either 1.9 or 1.10, and 1.10 wasn't released until halfway through the survey.

1: http://www.201-created.com/ember-community-survey-2015#relea...

I have specifically avoided angular because I feel like it's a monster in that you are so tied to learning and understanding it's proprietary system. I too have moved directly to react. Can anyone comment on how the skills learned by learning Angular can be applied any where else?

You're 100% right. Once you're in Angular-land you are completely tied to the framework. You don't think about "how can I make X in my domain happen?" you think about "how do I make X in Angular happen". This coupled with the horrific Angular docs make it really tough to justify using from a productivity standpoint.

I've moved to React as well and feel it's a 10x boost in productivity because I'm constantly thinking in my domain and not in a framework.

I am a newer developer, and this is how I feel. I didn't think it was normal. I always had problems grokking the docs as they are obtuse and thin. Also, things I find straight forward to implement in JS seem laborious in NG.

I am going to start learning react as well, and if you have any suggestions on how to get started, I would be appreciative of a few resources.

It's not like anything you build in React is going to transfer over to another framework either. In fact, I've been to a lot of React talks and people mostly ask "how do I do X" in react. The last talk I went to they spent 10 mins talking about how you might make a spinner when data is loading.

I think that's the nature of any framework.

No, it's different.

React is a rendering engine, it's covers the final piece of your web app (rendering a data structure into DOM). But whatever you do to create the data structure that gets passed to React is up to you. This keeps most of your domain logic outside the context of React, you just use React to render data->DOM. So basically the API you have to learn is just Javascript, which most people know already and is easy to lookup answers to your questions.

With Angular your domain logic exists in the context of the framework. i.e. if you ng-repeat something you can't just filter that collection with Javascript you have to use an ng-filter to do it which is a special Angular construct. So the API you have to learn to manipulate data isn't just Javascript it's Angular. And how does ng-filter work? Well, you're tied to the Angular docs to figure it out. The Angular docs are of particualary poor quality so this coupling turns into a really serious problem if you're trying to be productive.

To me React vs. Angular isn't a matter of preference like Ruby vs. Python -- it's more like git vs. FTP where there is a clear right answer if you're trying to be productive in a team envrionment.

Sigh... this is such an annoying comparison. If you want to compare, compare React to Angular Directives since that's a valid argument.

Your entire complaint is that full-stack front-end frameworks are bad and modular systems are good. It's great that you prefer modularity and the ability to mix and match tools.

But stop pretending React vs Angular is a thing. It isn't. git vs FTP... just stop.

This will not be the case at all with Angular2. Most of the "angular" stuff will be in annotations and your code is going to be vanilla ES6 for the most part (well, with TypeScript). So, you actually are going to have a lot more freedom to mix and max other technologies.

Also, FYI, the barrier in 1.x is not that high, either. There are many integrations between Angular and other frameworks (including React, FYI).

> There are many integrations between Angular and other frameworks (including React, FYI).

IME, it's a shit show, and totally inappropriate for production code. It's the mating of wrong sized dogs in the park.

You can even use react components in angular directives so this is just not true.

>>> I have specifically avoided angular because I feel like it's a monster in that you are so tied to learning and understanding it's proprietary system.

I actually had to exact opposite feeling about Angular. I loved that it was a complete framework and I didn't have to mix and match several libraries to get the functionality I needed.

Having said that, I've completely soured on Angular. From the big changes coming in 2.0, to not making this backwards compatible hasn't left me with any confidence they won't do this again in future releases.

I've already moved to Ember and haven't had any issues yet.

Yes, some parts are just basic structuring. Breaking an application into services, knowing what parts are singletons and not and finding ways to communicate between parts. If AtScript/TypeScript is used more you can use those skills in any project using the same language. Other parts are specific to Angular.

> The second-system effect is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors due to inflated expectations.[1]

Angular 2.0 is removing a lot of complexity and "magic" of 1.x. I've moved onto React but I think it's a bit too soon to say Angular 2.0 will be a bloated monstrosity relative to 1.x.

I think this is more of an impression because Angular 2.0 is embracing many other things that have nothing to do with Angular, like ES6, web components, typescript.

I notice that with people trying to learn TypeScript, and see that their struggle is with classes, lambdas and modules, not with the type system that is basically the only thing TS adds to ES6.

In the end, if you look at it there is not really much to understand and all the other things you will learn anyway with Ember, React, etc. I believe most of this fear will disappear once its released.

I would say the first version of Angular does, too.

I am holding out hope that this isn't the case because Angular is/was really brillant. But yes, it looks like version 2 got out of control.

Yea but this is almost a given with projects that get this popular.

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