Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 226 posts

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#11

Post by charrondev »

morinted wrote: post #3

Honestly, 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…

Upgrading dependencies can be a total pain in the ass, and in the end is why I've been so frustrated with TypeScript. My solution in the end was to just ignore typing for any 3rd party libraries that don't have them to begin with. As nice as a d.ts file, dealing with all the type definitions that need updating along with all the issues with updated the dependencies in the first place was just too much.

I had a pet project with react and redux that I didn't touch for a few months as I was busy with other things. I came back to it recently and there are new major version of: react-redux, redux, react-router, webpack and various plugins, react-router-redux, react-hotloader, babel, and I'm sure a couple other things. It was a PITA to set up in the first place, and just a few months later, it all needed to be reconfigured.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#12

Post by JohnnyConatus »

TL;DR - developer learns the meaning of Release Candidate or rather...does not:

"To be fair, I have been using versions of the library that have thus far not been officially released. Maybe, you say, it’s my fault for trying to download and use a version of the library that is still in alpha/beta/release candidate and expecting it to work and be relatively easy to use. Perhaps you are right. But, considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of developers are already using Angular 2, we should ask ourselves the question: is it responsible to release libraries that are still very much a work in progress?"

They told you it was an RC, but now that a lot of people have started using it, you want them to no longer treat it as an RC. (And like a true whiner who likely will never contribute a single line of code, you want this all for free, of course.)

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#13

Post by robin_reala »

Sorry, but sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the madhouse. It’s a blog! It’s literally just an index page and some display pages! Why could that possibly need 100s Kb of JS to run it? Of course you’re going to have trouble, you’ve picked a JCB to do a screwdriver’s job.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#14

Post by vertex-four »

lghh wrote: post #5
adrianpike wrote: post #2

I, 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…

On the other hand, frameworks like Ember are still chugging along quite happily, and swallowing up any actually good ideas the rest of the community has. For example, isomorphic apps spawned "fastboot", where with one plugin you can generate an isomorphic app from your existing Ember project (with some tweaking), talking to your existing API server.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#15

Post by aarpmcgee »

stevebmark wrote: post #9

To 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

Ember shares this problem, imo.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#17

Post by plexicle »

Your first foray into web development and you picked a large, unfinished (it wasn't final) framework to learn with? Then you are complaining that there were breaking changes you had to deal with?

I get your beef with the ecosystem, but this is a very unfair knock on Angular 2. Angular 2 was not the problem here at all.

Am I missing something obvious?

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#18

Post by geldan »

JohnnyConatus wrote: post #12

TL;DR - developer learns the meaning of Release Candidate or rather...does not: "To be fair, I have been using versions of the library that have thus far not been officially released. Maybe, you say, it’s my fault for trying to download and use a version of the library that is still in alpha/beta/release candidate and expecting it to work and be relatively easy to use. Perhaps you are right. But, considering the fact…

You do so in a derogatory manner, but you bring up a decent point. This doesn't really seem to be a JavaScript issue so much as an open source issue.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#19

Post by mkozlows »

robin_reala wrote: post #13

Sorry, but sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the madhouse. It’s a blog! It’s literally just an index page and some display pages! Why could that possibly need 100s Kb of JS to run it? Of course you’re going to have trouble, you’ve picked a JCB to do a screwdriver’s job.

The point is to use the blog as an example to learn the tech, typically. Picking a familiar, not-too-big problem to solve is a good way to understand how new tech works.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#20

Post by Marazan »

robin_reala wrote: post #13

Sorry, but sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the madhouse. It’s a blog! It’s literally just an index page and some display pages! Why could that possibly need 100s Kb of JS to run it? Of course you’re going to have trouble, you’ve picked a JCB to do a screwdriver’s job.

I felt the Post suggested an entire blogging platform.
Post reply on HN