Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
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Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
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Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#2I, too, would probably have a bad time if I was trying to learn a framework as it was being built.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#3Honestly, upgrading npm modules is never fun. This person is trying to learn the language at the same time -- you just can't expect that to work. You want to shrinkwrap / freeze your dependencies as soon as you can, and upgrade when it's clear that you are missing out and the effort to upgrade is worth the work that it takes to update.
I am using deprecated libraries at work. I just recently upgraded to React Router v2 when they are already gearing up for v3 (and refactoring for v4). It's just part of how the ecosystem works. We are lucky that a side effect of its business is the abundance of useful libraries.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#4I never used Angular 2, but that sounds like the biggest issue is a release candidate that should have been called a beta or alpha release.
I sometimes tend to try out beta releases when learning something new and interesting, but that does tend to backfire now and then when it's unstable enough that I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong, the framework is buggy or the documentation is simply outdated.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#5I, too, would probably have a bad time if I was trying to learn a framework as it was being built.
That's sort of the problem that the article was addressing. By the time things have been built, they are old news to the JS community - or at least those that you see on HN, Medium, blogs, etc. If you mention learning Angular 1 anywhere you get shouted at that it's old and should not be used and to instead look at Angular 2 and React. By the time those are established, it'll be on to something else.
And that isn't just the case for frameworks, it extends to tooling as well. JS is a mess - one that I am involved in first hand - and it's hard to find stable footing.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#6I've found that learning new technologies from first principles is better than starting with frameworks, unless you're willing to put up with a lot of ambiguity. For example with Javascript I'd start with basic manipulations (e.g. get to know the prototype model, the debuggers, the DOM, etc.), work up to a make-life-easier library like JQuery, then try a framework. It may depend on your learning style, of course.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#7I hear the author's pain. So much churn as I attempted to keep pace with RC changes. I'm sticking with NG2 cause for the rare times I was writing app code instead of fighting with NPM I enjoyed the developer experience...
...except for Zone.js errors. Everytime I saw a zone.js error in the call stack my brain perceived it as a giant middle finger rendered in ASCII in my console.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#8I, too, would probably have a bad time if I was trying to learn a framework as it was being built.
That's sort of the problem that the article was addressing. By the time things have been built, they are old news to the JS community - or at least those that you see on HN, Medium, blogs, etc. If you mention learning Angular 1 anywhere you get shouted at that it's old and should not be used and to instead look at Angular 2 and React. By the time those are established, it'll be on to something else. And that isn't ju…
Yep, I've been burned by that many times. Eventually you have to trust in authors' use of semver or other versioning systems, and that _too_ has bitten me poorly.
I think a big portion of pain is around the sheer depth of the dependency trees we wind up in npm/js land these days - a trivial little service can wind up with hundreds of disparately maintained dependencies, and you just have to shrinkwrap, hope, and cross your fingers things work out.
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#9To me this is still why React feels like the first front end UI framework that got it "right." It stays close to vanilla Javascript. There's a tiny API surface area to learn, and the rest is vanilla Javascript classes and functions. Angular's API, and apparently Angular 2.0's API, is still large, and strays far from vanilla Javascript
Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
#10Honestly, upgrading npm modules is never fun. This person is trying to learn the language at the same time -- you just can't expect that to work. You want to shrinkwrap / freeze your dependencies as soon as you can, and upgrade when it's clear that you are missing out and the effort to upgrade is worth the work that it takes to update. I am using deprecated libraries at work. I just recently upgraded to React Router…
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