Criticisms of Angular • Hacker News Board

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#121

Post by Bahamut » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #113

Bahamut wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if a business needs to, I would recommend they move to React now - Angular 2 is shaping up to be quite impressive, and taking pretty much all of the lessons that Facebook has brought with React (& possibilities brought about by the generally clean architecture such as server-side rendering, native mobile app support, etc.), and refining it ruthlessly, but you can only use what is available if you are consumin…

> ng2 manages to use this and still optimize dramatically over React due to how change detection works in Angular. That's what the angular team claims yet, there is absolutely no proof that ng2 templates are faster than React, and I did my own benchmarks. You can say "it's still alpha" , but if speed is a business requirement for ng2, alpha doesn't fulfill that promise. > The Angular 2 DI is much better than the Angu…

Actual benchmarks would disagree with your claim - the Meteor team did a benchmark and found Angular 2 significantly faster than Angular 1 (I hope so), React, and their own Blaze. The perf gap increases dramatically with the more DOM elements worked with - the best part is that the Angular and Meteor team's benchmarks are both open source! (The Angular team does not compare with React, just Angular 1 and a baseline of no JS generated DOM)

The problem I have found with most codebases written with angular is by far the underengineering put into it, sometimes to an appalling degree. The new DI is pretty simple - specify an array of services, or just define the array elsewhere and import it in and set it to a config onject. There is not much complexity on the user's side.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#122

Post by aikah » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:07 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #45

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…

I have no issue liking angularjs. It's everywhere in the industry so let's not think that everybody hates it. It has problems , but I've yet to see a framework that allows developers to write complex front-end apps faster. There is none in my opinion. Anything that involves settings up events in some ways (and React usage involves writing event handlers) is a no deal for me.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#123

Post by aikah » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

nateabele wrote: post #30

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?

"There are 2 kind of front-end frameworks, the ones that people keep complaining about and the ones that nobody uses" /s

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#124

Post by pwfisher » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

Our company had two Angular codebases, the public site and our internal site. Experience in one taught you nothing about the other because there was no "Angular way" to structure your code.

Having "enough rope to hang yourself" while our devs were just learning Angular led to an unholy mess. Development slowed to a painful crawl.

We hate Angular. We're an Ember shop now. We love Ember!

Angular gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Ember lets you stand on the shoulders of giants.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#125

Post by aikah » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #121

aikah wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ng2 manages to use this and still optimize dramatically over React due to how change detection works in Angular. That's what the angular team claims yet, there is absolutely no proof that ng2 templates are faster than React, and I did my own benchmarks. You can say "it's still alpha" , but if speed is a business requirement for ng2, alpha doesn't fulfill that promise. > The Angular 2 DI is much better than the Angu…

Actual benchmarks would disagree with your claim - the Meteor team did a benchmark and found Angular 2 significantly faster than Angular 1 (I hope so), React, and their own Blaze. The perf gap increases dramatically with the more DOM elements worked with - the best part is that the Angular and Meteor team's benchmarks are both open source! (The Angular team does not compare with React, just Angular 1 and a baseline o…

> the underengineering put into it,

There is no such things as underengineering, given specific business requirements. On the other hand, writting useless code is something I often see with people abusing IoC containers like Spring. If a minimal codebase passes the acceptance tests it is not "underengineering" ,it's actually doing one's job as a developer.

Anyway i'm really against the lack of pragmatism in the new DI. But don't worry , by the time ng2 is realised you'll see an avalanche of blog posts about how horrible it is. Mark my words.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#126

Post by SonicSoul » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

pwfisher wrote: post #124

Our company had two Angular codebases, the public site and our internal site. Experience in one taught you nothing about the other because there was no "Angular way" to structure your code. Having "enough rope to hang yourself" while our devs were just learning Angular led to an unholy mess. Development slowed to a painful crawl. We hate Angular. We're an Ember shop now. We love Ember! Angular gives you enough rope t…

Interestingly I've heard similar sentiments from Ember developers, mainly that it is much more 'opinionated' than Angular.

In my experience with Angular there is a pretty clear logic on how to structure code. I suppose that logic is not enforced so there is nothing to stop developers from just cramming all code into index.thml. Being a dev manager I've adopted feature structure [0] and it has worked quite well across all our apps.

Furthermore there is pretty clear distinction on what kind of logic should be included in controller vs service vs factory vs module. This has made writing unit tests a breeze in my experience.

I'd be curious to hear what Ember constructs exist that helped you so much.

[0] http://www.johnpapa.net/angular-growth-structure/

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#127

Post by snorrah » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

SonicSoul wrote: post #57

This is a rehash of the same problems that have been circulating for years [0]. There is literately not a single original thing here. Most of these issues are gotchas that can easily be avoided once the developer is aware of them (such as scope inheritance / dynamic scope which is due to Javascript Prototypal Inheritance [1]). What's ironic is that angular 2 is fully rewritten in part to fix all of these issues, but…

Where is this focus about Angular 2 sucking? The author is in fact happy about Angular 2 being a re-write. Read the section under Problem 6, where he calls the proposed complete re-write of Angular courageous and laudable.

Now he says this is a problem for Angular 1.x because there's no carry-over of knowledge into 2.x, but that's in no-one saying Angular 2 sucks like you are suggesting.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#128

Post by SonicSoul » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

snorrah wrote: post #127

SonicSoul wrote: post #57

This is a rehash of the same problems that have been circulating for years [0]. There is literately not a single original thing here. Most of these issues are gotchas that can easily be avoided once the developer is aware of them (such as scope inheritance / dynamic scope which is due to Javascript Prototypal Inheritance [1]). What's ironic is that angular 2 is fully rewritten in part to fix all of these issues, but…

Where is this focus about Angular 2 sucking? The author is in fact happy about Angular 2 being a re-write. Read the section under Problem 6, where he calls the proposed complete re-write of Angular courageous and laudable. Now he says this is a problem for Angular 1.x because there's no carry-over of knowledge into 2.x, but that's in no-one saying Angular 2 sucks like you are suggesting.

you're right, that was not the best way to put it. I just saw this which seemed like focusing on negative w/out noting that all his complaints will be addressed.

Not convinced yet? Well, what if we were to tell you that the next major version of Angular will take a scorched earth approach to the existing structure that means it will have zero retro-compatibility with what exists today?

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#129

Post by ohitsdom » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #59

fein wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Dirty Checking: Yes, we have have to sacrifice ease of use for performance sometimes. So keep it in mind and don't make so many simultaneous data bindings. Why you would need 2000+ in any given state(ui-router)/route is just mystifying. Don't abuse ng-model. As someone who's going to need to make a recommendation soon about whether or not to use Angular on a new project, this part worries me. The apps my company buil…

knockout.js doesn't do everything Angular does, but it does two-way binding incredibly well. Very efficient with binding and rendering, so you don't need to be concerned with total data binding count.

Re: Criticisms of Angular

#130

Post by Bahamut » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:48 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #125

Bahamut wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual benchmarks would disagree with your claim - the Meteor team did a benchmark and found Angular 2 significantly faster than Angular 1 (I hope so), React, and their own Blaze. The perf gap increases dramatically with the more DOM elements worked with - the best part is that the Angular and Meteor team's benchmarks are both open source! (The Angular team does not compare with React, just Angular 1 and a baseline o…

> the underengineering put into it, There is no such things as underengineering, given specific business requirements. On the other hand, writting useless code is something I often see with people abusing IoC containers like Spring. If a minimal codebase passes the acceptance tests it is not "underengineering" ,it's actually doing one's job as a developer. Anyway i'm really against the lack of pragmatism in the new D…

There is such a thing called underengineering - it happens quite often at dev shops where developers do not plan their code out with flexibility, clarity, and modularity, where you run into poor abstractions that are inflexible because not enough thought went into what approach would work best for potential business needs...and unsurprisingly, that sort of code often is difficult, if not impossible, to properly test.

Re: ng2 DI, I disagree, I have used the ng2 DI system for almost a year now, in production code as well for a large part of it.

The new DI is decoupled from any framework, allows multiple injectors, avoids verbose hackiness, and is more natural to use - all significant improvements to ng1. There is literally nothing lost, only additions in terms of features and flexibility.