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Criticisms of Angular

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Re: Criticisms of Angular

#71
post #37

So, they trot out the same tired arguments against Angular that people have been making since the beginning, and this makes the front page where people engage in serious discussion about it? Did I miss some subtle novelty about this post, or is Angular ennui just that popular on HN?

Not to mention his example is just straight wrong about $scope and ng-if. His JSFiddle examples are all using angular 1.1.5. Angular 1.2 properly binds scope inside an ng-if. I agree that angular 1.1.5 had it's warts, if that's what this is supposed to be about. The current release version of angular is 1.4, about to be 1.5. Edit: After fully reading through this blog post; it's almost all wrong. Dirty Checking: Yes,…

> Dependency Injection: Are you kidding me? He's not even using the array notation for proper DI with minification.

Can I just say that this is the single thing that really irritates me about Angular?

This has been the "gotcha" forever... why are all the guides not using this syntax by default? Why is this just not "the way you do things" if everyone knows this is a problem?

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#72
post #34
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of solve the same problem, but in different ways. I, for one, think it's debatable if the 800 lb gorilla that is dependency injection has any merit in javascript.

> They kind of solve the same problem no they don't. That's a fundamental mistake to say that. DI is about inversion of control , modules don't do that.

IoC is the way that DI solves the problem. But the problem is dependency management - and there are other ways around that.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#73

Valid criticisms of Angular include that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself, that the documentation/tutorials teach you to code Angular in a bad way (abuse the $scope object, etc.) in the interest of making it "easy" and that the terminology and symbols used can be simplified. However, once you learn to avoid Angular's pitfalls, it's a very powerful tool for creating large apps that do not collapse under their…

Yours is the third post I see that amounts to "you're doing it wrong."

But if the docs are bad, and there are pitfalls that experienced Angular devs know to avoid, how can we distill that down into common knowledge that beginners can avoid?

Can you recommend a book or resource that does that?

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#74

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who actually likes Angular. Two way data bindings are very convenient for writing UI. I don't want to write an event listener for every onclick, onchange, and onkeypress. I want the values in my models and the values in the DOM to be in sync. I like using nearly straight up HTML as my template. I do this in Django, so why not in Angular? I like that I don't need to render things…

IMO there is no problem with Angular, except when people use it as a square peg with a round hole. It's ideal for your use case - lots of data entry, forms, etc. etc. But then someone tries to write a blog platform with it, or something.

I think part of the problem is that everyone wants there to be The Next Thing that will solve all problems, when that doesn't exist.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#75

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who actually likes Angular. Two way data bindings are very convenient for writing UI. I don't want to write an event listener for every onclick, onchange, and onkeypress. I want the values in my models and the values in the DOM to be in sync. I like using nearly straight up HTML as my template. I do this in Django, so why not in Angular? I like that I don't need to render things…

>Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who actually likes Angular. Two way data bindings are very convenient for writing UI. I don't want to write an event listener for every onclick, onchange, and onkeypress. I want the values in my models and the values in the DOM to be in sync.

React solves all of those in a cleaner way.

>I like using nearly straight up HTML as my template.

And yet you don't. You use Angular-ized HTML as your template.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#76
I love Angular but I often find when I look on StackOverflow for a better way to do something that the most upvoted "solution" is often the WRONG way(Abusing watchers, Abusing $scope, etc) to do something and often contradicts what's in the Angular docs. I can't help but think to myself, "No wonder people hate angular. There's so much bad documentation(Official and Unofficial) and hacky solutions out there. No wonder people are having a bad time."

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#77

I haven't tried Angular yet but have built applications in React. In my opinion, frameworks like Angular suffer from a fundamental problem, that, it is almost impossible to gauge the problems of a new design unless you have a built a medium - large scale application with it which is very hard when you are just experimenting. There might be few heuristics, few rule of thumbs one can follow but still it will be hard to…

I've never understood any comparison between React and Angular. To me it seems like trying to compare a slick car to a fancy car garage. They try to solve quite different problems, right?

No. When people say React they mean React and a helper Flux-like framework.

So, both are garages in this sense.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#78
The #6 complaint on "server-side rendering" calls the rest of the article into question. This illustrates a fundamental "missing the point" of either Angular or React. Client-side templating is one of the essential ideas.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#79
Angular's dependency injection system is much much better than dealing with CommonJS/AMD in my opinion. I would be okay with ES6 modules too but apparently those aren't getting much love yet.

The scoping in AngularJS can be a bit of a pain but I mean, if you know it's dynamically scoped and you know that the directive (ng-if) is introducing a new scope then it isn't the end of the world. Emacs has dynamic binding and it's been working on pretty well so far and contributes to extensibility.

I wonder how the author would convert Angular to use lexical scoping instead of dynamic scoping; would it even be possible without forcing all directives to have a lot of boiler plate?

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#80

So, they trot out the same tired arguments against Angular that people have been making since the beginning, and this makes the front page where people engage in serious discussion about it? Did I miss some subtle novelty about this post, or is Angular ennui just that popular on HN?

I feel like I have to do a reply and address the post. Angular has unique strengths that make me actually want to use React + Angular.
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