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Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

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Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#71

Post by lolc »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
lolc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about API breakage in release candidates is justified. It happens far too often so people are desensitized to it. Maybe I'm old-fashioned but if you're still planning on changing the API, don't call it a release candidate.

> Maybe I'm old-fashioned but if you're still planning on changing the API, don't call it a release candidate. If you are planning on changing anything it shouldn't be a release candidate . OTOH, the reason for the "candidate" part of "release candidate" is that things may still change from the plan.

Yes if you clarify a few wrinkles in the API from one RC to the next that is expected.

If you have a bunch of active, unmerged, and API-breaking branches where you're not sure which one is going to make it into the release, don't call it a release candidate because you're planning to change the API. (I don't know whether this was the case with Angular, I just assume it after reading the rant.)

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#72

Post by Bahamut »

danso wrote: post #54
jkkramer wrote: post #36

It's interesting to contrast how Google and Facebook both approach open source for the web. Google tends to release code and promote it without really using it much internally first. Documentation is prolific but confusingly organized and often fragmented among several versions simultaneously (cough, Google Analytics). Facebook, on the other hand, actually seems to use their code before releasing and promoting it. Lo…

This reminds me of the excellent episode of Changelog in which Facebook's head of open source discussed the logistics of managing React so that the public version is exactly the same as the version used by Facebook itself: https://changelog.com/211/ Really drove home the concept that open-source requires significant thinking and discipline when a library becomes heavily used.

That's not any different from how Google uses Angular - Google runs off of HEAD on master, in 1 & 2

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#73

Post by argonaut »

jkkramer wrote: post #36

It's interesting to contrast how Google and Facebook both approach open source for the web. Google tends to release code and promote it without really using it much internally first. Documentation is prolific but confusingly organized and often fragmented among several versions simultaneously (cough, Google Analytics). Facebook, on the other hand, actually seems to use their code before releasing and promoting it. Lo…

Except for the tons of counterexamples at Google...

Bazel, Tensorflow, protobufs, GWT (a web/JavaScript project!), dozens of utility libraries, etc.

You are forgetting that Google is a huge company, much bigger than Facebook. It's more a collection of disparate entities than a monolithic giant. Each open source project is run differently.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#74

Post by plexicle »

OskarS wrote: post #59
plexicle wrote: post #17

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?

He didn't pick up a pre-alpha nightly build of the framework, he used the release candidate for christ's sake. A release candidate is a "release candidate", that is to say "we're pretty sure we could release this whole thing right now, but we want to send it out to the community to make sure there are no catastrophic bugs we haven't noticed". In other words feature-complete, and with most of the kinks ironed out. It'…

RCs should IDEALLY not have breaking changes. You can dice it up any way you want, but it wasn't a final build and there were obviously some rough edges.

Angular 2 is final now and they've committed to no more breaking changes until the next major build (at least 6 months away). If s/he started learning with it today, then ~90% of what s/he was complaining about in this post wouldn't have been a thing. That was my only point.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#75

Post by mewm »

Bahamut wrote: post #72
danso wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the excellent episode of Changelog in which Facebook's head of open source discussed the logistics of managing React so that the public version is exactly the same as the version used by Facebook itself: https://changelog.com/211/ Really drove home the concept that open-source requires significant thinking and discipline when a library becomes heavily used.

That's not any different from how Google uses Angular - Google runs off of HEAD on master, in 1 & 2

Can you enlighten me where Google uses Angular in their own apps?

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#76

Post by janfoeh »

I've said it before here and I'll say it again: the JS ecosystem is moving in the wrong direction.

Sometimes I feel that with Javascript, we developers have taken something that wasn't ours, and we're in the process of destroying the best thing there ever was about it.

One of its best qualities used to be that you could have absolutely no idea what you're doing, read a few bad tutorials somewhere on the web, mash your head onto the keyboard and end up with something horrifying that was nevertheless close to what you wanted to achieve. It was beautiful, egalitarian. Like the web is supposed to be.

I've spent quite a bit of time on Stackoverflow, coaching people who you would not call developers (nor would they themselves) on how to do that one tiny thing they wanted to add to the site for their bakery, yoga studio or blog. And almost got it working themselves. I know of no other language that can tell a similar success story, with that high an impact.

Just insert that for that jQuery plugin here and modify that initializer over there with a vague understand of how it needs to be adapted to your situation. Voilà!

But we couldn't let that stand, could we? Because what works for Alice and Bob doesn't work for somebody writing that 200.000 line image editor or CRM in JS, and let's face it, that's what the web is about.

So here we are, the single tag having been replaced with compilers, transpilers, five mutually incompatible build systems, three different module systems in God knows how many implementations, frameworks changing their API every ten minutes and five thousand lines of NPM module code to be installed for even the simplest of tasks.

We did it, gals and guys! The web is safely back in the hands of full-time professionals (with Hindu cow-like frustration tolerance). Where it belongs.

Bah.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#77

Post by jt2190 »

mewm wrote: post #75
Bahamut wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not any different from how Google uses Angular - Google runs off of HEAD on master, in 1 & 2

Can you enlighten me where Google uses Angular in their own apps?

https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#78

Post by zzguy »

ausjke wrote: post #23

I have been wondering why a one-person project like vue.js seems to be saner than the big guns such as angularjs and even react-ecosystem? I have been trying all three recently back and forth and now leaning back to vuejs while waiting for its 2.0 release.

Linux was started by one dude. Good software is not dependent on the amount of developers. In fact, in my experience, more cooks in the kitchen just causes more fires.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#79

Post by jkkramer »

argonaut wrote: post #73
jkkramer wrote: post #36

It's interesting to contrast how Google and Facebook both approach open source for the web. Google tends to release code and promote it without really using it much internally first. Documentation is prolific but confusingly organized and often fragmented among several versions simultaneously (cough, Google Analytics). Facebook, on the other hand, actually seems to use their code before releasing and promoting it. Lo…

Except for the tons of counterexamples at Google... Bazel, Tensorflow, protobufs, GWT (a web/JavaScript project!), dozens of utility libraries, etc. You are forgetting that Google is a huge company, much bigger than Facebook. It's more a collection of disparate entities than a monolithic giant. Each open source project is run differently.

It's my experience with their web-oriented and JavaScript projects. They definitely put out lots of high quality open source work in other domains.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#80

Post by specialp »

stupidcar wrote: post #69
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

Tell me about it! Literally all you need is React. Oh, plus react-router for routing, I guess. And Redux, obviously. Plus react-router-redux to link them together, and react-router-scroll for scroll history. Also react-intl to handle internationalisation. And react-helmet to do document header stuff. You'll need to use immutable as well, obviously , so you'll need redux-immutable. And redux-saga. Hmm, you'll definite…

I think OP has made a mistake calling it a framework as it is not a framework, it is a library. People have added more libraries to it. On the contrary, yes Angular is a bonafide kitchen sink framework missing the major advantage of a framework: A STABLE somewhat opinionated stack. You are correct though that making React into a "framework" is a hot mess.
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