Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Angular 2 is having a lot of pushback and challenges, but this may be a positive.

First, there have been hard feelings over breaking backward compatibility. To rub salt in the wound the new syntax doesn't seem to buy you much for many basic scenarios. If you are going to push big breaking changes you need to show big benefits that are easy to understand at a glance.

Secondly, the Ember community started small but has been kicking ass for a while now and making many improvements that are compelling to developers. It's a modern framework, but also easier to understand than some competitors like react.

I see the Typescript move as a positive because it shows they are at least trying to do what's right even when using tech from one of the biggest competitors. How this played internally at Google to overcome executive knee-jerk/bureaucracy/pettiness I don't know, but it's a good sign.

The community has clearly spoken, and the future of Angular is now riding on how well they absorb and react to the feedback and advances from competing teams.

The typescript move is more along the lines of "we had these extensions to typescript we were calling AtScript, but now they're included in the forthcoming release of TypeScript, so we'll just call it Typescript". It doesn't seem to actually change any on-the-ground syntax, just what you call the language.

another, more important piece (IMO) of response to the pushback they've been getting came during the new router demo at ng-conf today. Apparently, you'll be able to mix-and-match ng2 and ng1 routes within the same router, so the commitment was: if you use the new router, there's a clear incremental upgrade path as you port parts of your app to ng2.

I'm still in wait-and-see mode, but there's apparently also talk (from the same router talk) of tools to convert ui-router built routers to the new router, which would be double-rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecg70fPDFw (the router talk in question)

> just what you call the language.

Being part of an existing project that's backed by both MS and Google is a significant value proposition though. I wouldn't have learned AtScript, although I'll probably end up learning Typescript now even though they're the exact same thing.

The main mistake, in my opinion, that Angular 2.0 is making is removing two-way data binding. The whole cornerstone of my love for Angular was the idea that wherever data was updated (view, model, server, another user's browser, etc.) it was trivial to make that update appear everywhere else. This is even more powerful when you add in a technology like WebRTC data channels or websockets.

I could just bind the data to the view, and if the user changed it, I could react accordingly. Data changing became an actual event that I could subscribe to. It abstracted away the onkeydown, onkeyup, onclick, etc. so that it just became ng-change. So much less mental noise when I'm developing when all I have to do is react to data having changed.

I hope this gets picked up. ES6 and TypeScript have so much to offer, but without a data-centric paradigm, I find I'm just not interested anymore.

I had the same "wow" moment with two-way binding awhile back. Now I think that the important part is having a source of record that consumers can observe for changes, and a good way to update that source of record. Two-way binding is just one way to give you that. In my experience it's far more common to read data than write it, so making it more explicit where writes are happening is not burdensome and seems more maintainable and performant.

I think that the Angular team has not decided on two-way data binding yet. They maybe keeping it and I just asked this question on the reddit ama that they are going to do over at the /r/ngconf subreddit.

> The main mistake, in my opinion, that Angular 2.0 is making is removing two-way data binding

They talked about it in the ng-conf available on youtube. They are not removing 2-way databinding from Angular, they are just changing the way it works.

PHP was also very easy to understand. Maybe sometimes, as a professional you have to spend few weeks grasping a complex paradigm, if that is going to boost your productivity for a couple of years afterwards.

About breaking backward compatibility - they mentioned at ng-conf an interesting thing today: you'll be able to partially migrate from Angular 1.x to Angular 2 in both ways - having either Angular 1.x app with some Angular 2 components, or Angular 2 app with some Angular 1.x components.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLOETEcp3DkCoNnlhE-7fovYv...

>how well they absorb and react to the feedback and advances from competing teams.

pun intended?

The best part of this announcement is the reminder that Typescript is worth adopting. Sorry "Angular 2" your just not welcome in my leading edge reality.

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