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Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

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Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#141

Post by AgentME »

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've used React by itself for over a year before I ever reached for anything else you mentioned there. I eventually picked up many of the other things you mentioned too, and they were very useful, but they were very far from being necessary to make use of React, and I probably would've wanted them or something close if I didn't use React.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#142

Post by Andrex »

janfoeh wrote: post #107
Andrex wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get where you're coming from but your comment boils down in favor of unoptimized and insecure code. And I can't agree with that. I would also point out that the web is the most backwards-compatible platform of all time and Alice and Bob can continue doing their thing for as long as they want. The tools that professionals use today are an abstraction to increase efficiency and reduce code reuse, in the same way most…

I appreciate your position, I really do. It's not like I am clear-cut on this myself, even if my frustration makes it sounds like I am. I appreciate that the language, the platform and the web itself needs to evolve. But I object to the argument that people can just continue to do their thing, because people in that position are overwhelmingly dependent on the ecosystem. Guidance, libraries, tools. And that ecosystem…

It's certainly an interesting conundrum, and I agree that eventually without ecosystem support Alice and Bob might find things a little tough.

However, it's important to realize that the way the web is moving is to not only benefit the working professionals being paid to write it, but also the consumers who experience it.

Why do we have minifiers and transpilers and modules and font icons? Why do we aim for one script tag instead of 50?

Because for a consumer, the web sucked (and still sucks to an extent, but less so with AMP and offline APIs.) For "prosumers" like Alice and Bob, it was a buffet, but for people browing their web pages it sucked. It was slow and unresponsive and that's even before the rise of the mobile web.

And whether the ecosystem leaves them behind or not, Alice and Bob can always create a new slideshow.js file on any given platform they want.

The web is moving towards being better for professionals and consumers, and I agree that those in the middle might lose out a little, but they are very small peanuts. I'd rather optimize for the next billion users in Africa, India and beyond, most of whom are on sub-2G speeds, than for the script kiddies making an easy living pilfering jQuery widgets without learning the platform.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#143

Post by douche »

Andrex wrote: post #142
janfoeh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your position, I really do. It's not like I am clear-cut on this myself, even if my frustration makes it sounds like I am. I appreciate that the language, the platform and the web itself needs to evolve. But I object to the argument that people can just continue to do their thing, because people in that position are overwhelmingly dependent on the ecosystem. Guidance, libraries, tools. And that ecosystem…

It's certainly an interesting conundrum, and I agree that eventually without ecosystem support Alice and Bob might find things a little tough. However, it's important to realize that the way the web is moving is to not only benefit the working professionals being paid to write it, but also the consumers who experience it. Why do we have minifiers and transpilers and modules and font icons? Why do we aim for one scrip…

I miss the days of the plain-old html web. It might have been ugly, and there might have been marquees and blink tags, and under construction signs, and webrings and webmasters, but it loaded over my 56k modem, nobody was screwing with my back button, or messing up scrolling, or popping modals in my face, or pestering me with anti-anti-anti-ad-blocking nag modals and interstitials.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#144

Post by janfoeh »

untog wrote: post #134
Zelphyr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, it has become popular in our industry to equate new with "quality". So, while you're correct that jQuery isn't dead and in fact is more mature, there are too many who won't use it almost because its mature. Its not the new shiny that it once was. But frameworks like React and Angular are very shiny. Even though, in my opinion, they're quite simply a mess.

I think there is an element of people using things because they are new and shiny, yes. But plenty of people use React and Angular over jQuery because they make 1000x more sense when putting together a large web application with multiple developers contributing to the codebase.

Sure, for larger projects a good, well-thought out and consistent framework is a godsend. No doubt about it that plenty of people make very good use of the frameworks and libraries at our disposal.

But on the other hand I cannot count the number of times I've seen Angular included for a simple contact form with validation on a static site, React to render a single trivial dynamic list or a nice, but basic JS lib that only works in module form via NPM exports.

Sorry if I sound like a fortune cookie, but it's true - if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Since 2001 or so, I can count on three fingers the number of variable collisions I have experienced in small- to medium scale projects. That I as a newbie now have to understand and manage various module systems in order to embed a lightbox on my site is a huge jump in complexity for a gain that is at best negligible in practice.

And while you and I probably have worked on some higher-complexity use cases, I think we would be kidding ourselves if we assumed that this constitutes the majority of the web.

Because that's not Facebook-scale, it's the dude around your corner selling dishwashers and reparing washing machines, trying to get his inventories's prices from an Excel sheet onto his page with a minimum of fuzz.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#145

Post by seangrogg »

I find it hard to take this article seriously when it's about issues with a framework:

* that was still in beta/upgrading to the official version that was released last week

* that was redesigned from the ground up by a company that is pretty intent on not doing things in JavaScript (see Dart, TypeScript docs but no ES5 docs)

* whose original announcement of versional incompatibility was one of the major reasons its competition became popular

* has clearly been attempting to frankenstein a lot of ideas from other libraries/frameworks in awkward ways

The JavaScript community definitely has warts - I have zero issue with that statement. But the real problem comes from developers from other language-communities making blanket statements about the JS community while using tools that are clearly marked as unstable when they could've just as easily (actually... much more easily) written said app with any library/framework that wasn't released literally a week ago or even used raw JS - an API that hasn't had many breaking changes or compatibility issues in quite a while.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#146

Post by barryhoodlum »

alexbecker wrote: post #65
brentvatne wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

import React from 'react'; import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'; function App(props) { return Hello {props.name} ; } ReactDOM.render( , document.getElementById('root') ); Or the alternative component API that has componentWillMount, componentDidMount, componentWillReceiveProps, shouldComponentUpdate, componentDidUpdate, componentWillUnmount, and render. That's pretty much all there is

I believe they are complaining about the ~150kb minified filesize, rather than the API surface area.

It's under 40kb gzipped. If that's a sizeable percentage of your total JS code, you probably didn't need React in the first place.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#147

Post by [deleted] »

janfoeh wrote: post #76

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 you…

[deleted]

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#148

Post by lmkg »

janfoeh wrote: post #76

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 you…

  > 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.

  > I know of no other language that can tell a similar 
  > success story, with that high an impact.
I assure you, the same is definitely true of VBA.

And I agree with your overall point. Shitty code often makes the world a better place. It gets a bad rap from developers because we compare it to good code. But shitty code written by non-devs is not replacing good code, it is replacing an absence of code. And shitty code, for all its sins, is still often better than no code at all (which usually has the same sins).

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#149

Post by _prototype_ »

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'd much rather select the libraries and frameworks I want to use than some huge monolithic beast of a framework. Oh did I mention that all the libraries I select in the react echo system are just JS? Not some massively proprietary framework like angular? yeah.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#150

Post by barryhoodlum »

bicknergseng wrote: post #115
nanny wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A to-do list would've been a better choice. It's the classic choice for working with SPA frameworks. I thought the same thing as your parent's commenter when I read the word "blog".

To be honest, TodoMVC is the idea-that-needs-to-die™ for SPAs. IMO, if all the framework needs to be able to do is described by TodoMVC, you probably don't need a framework at all. It probably takes way less time to write a todolist in a vanilla language than to learn an entire application framework to build it.

And you can write a simple and clean TODO app in any framework. You really need to see how it manages complexity to evaluate it properly.
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