Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

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I have been using Angular for the past two years as the primary front-end dev in a start-up. Prior to that I spent ten years doing web development, both back-end and front-end, with a wide variety of libraries and frameworks.

Angular is still, by far, the best framework I have ever used. I have zero regrets about choosing it.

This post reflects the pathological nonsense that pervades certain quarters of front-end development. It demonstrates the following fallacies:

1. If a technology has any flaws, they render the whole thing worthless.

2. New technologies that I haven't tried are probably perfect and won't require any hacks.

3. Kids these days aren't doing any real programming like we did back when we coded in Backbone / jQuery / Raw JS / VBScript / Java / C++ / COBOL / Assembly / Punch-cards.

4. Syntactic sugar and abstractions are inherently bad, whereas writing a lot of boilerplate code is good for the soul.

5. Someone I respect doesn't like something, so I shouldn't like it either.

6. Old, widely deployed technologies are over-complicated, because people have built more complex systems with them than with new technologies, and thus have been forced to tackle more complex requirements.

7. I have worked with this technology for a while, and built up a corpus of specialist knowledge and hacks, therefore it is more flawed and than these newer technologies, which I haven't worked with and therefore only understand in a shallow way, and therefore seem simpler.

8. Acquiring specialist knowledge is bad, and not the reason I am paid to do what I do.

Good points, but angular has the very real drawback of useless terminology (transclude?) and a lot of wheel-reinvention (the several strange types of components). It's a pretty standard observable framework dressed up with a bunch of unnecessary hocus pocus (and pretty bad performance).

I've strongly disliked angular as long as I've been able to code. On the other hand, I like react a lot even though it has a similar learning curve. React may have strange and unfamiliar concepts, but they are actually new concepts in ui development that make things less error prone, very performant, and cross platform.

If the angular team was not funded by Google, I doubt any of them would be working on it any more. Actually, with angular 2, that's the case anyway.

If you don't like dom-diffing frameworks, maybe check out vuejs. This is an observable framework like angular, but it's performance is acceptable and its api is very clean and makes sense.

9 years checking in. Front and back end. Previously spent 1.3 years working on a behemoth of an Angular app for a corporate client. No complaints. Agree with your analysis of the article.

Good identification of some common fallacies and misconceptions. If anyone finds the fallacies hard to read, here are restatements of some of them as straight advice:

• If a technology has flaws, that does not render the whole thing worthless.

• New technologies that you haven’t tried are not perfect, and will still require hacks.

• You have worked with some technology for a while, and built up a corpus of specialist knowledge and hacks. That does not necessarily mean that it is more flawed than some newer technology that seems simpler. That apparent simplicity is probably just because you haven’t worked with it and therefore only understand it in a shallow way.

• Old, widely deployed technologies are not over-complicated. It just seems that way because people have built more complex systems with them than with new technologies, and thus have been forced to tackle more complex requirements.

• Acquiring specialist knowledge is not bad – it is the reason you are paid to do what you do.

I laughed and cried.

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