Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What I am sure of is that a system that is less complex and easier to use is better engineering. I agree. I think this is what made the success of very popular libraries (such as Jquery), but also protocols like email and the web. I've been trying very hard to use Ember on a couple small projects, and I found it very hard not to get frustrated by how difficult it is to execute some trivial tasks. Part of the probl…
I was being aggressive because I feel strongly that people like this man are supporting and being wishy-washy about Ember simply because they are afraid that they will look bad if they admit that Ember was difficult to use. And I forgot that language like that simply was not accepted on this website unfortunately. However, I believe that the aggressiveness was warranted because there are quite a large number of organ…
I would ask that you consider, for a moment, that it is possible for someone to hold simultaneous opposing views. I also would ask for you to go back and re-read Brooks' essay about accidental and essential complexity. I believe that the choice of framework and the difficulties associated with a specific framework fall into the accidental complexity category. If after reading the essay you believe the same, then you would conclude that both choices in this thread have similar inherent merits. Such an opinion wouldn't be wishy-washy or a cop-out, but, perhaps, closer to a deeper understanding of our craft.
Every MVC framework I've used in production (Catalyst, ASP MVC, Cake, Spring, Rails, Rails with Spine, this batch of JavaScript frameworks) has had warts and frustrating moments just as all of the web languages have frustrations (Perl with maintainability, PHP with amateur hour inconsistencies, Python with tab/spaces that different IDEs will autocorrect, Rails with too much 'magic' that leads to serious bugs, Java with too much verbosity, Spring with too much XML, C# with too expensive support, Django with too many required add-on libraries, Rust with too few libraries, Go with too new, etc, etc).
Ember was not any harder than Angular to get going (ever try to untangle the service/factory/module/controller mess?). And I have no shame in admitting that I took at least three full workdays to learn each. At the end of the day the two frameworks were just different, in the same way that writing an app using JavaScript MVC is just different than how I used to write ASP MVC apps. The reason I use the newer stuff is because the newer stuff is more fun, I can be more responsive, and (in some cases) I can host an entire webapp on s3 (managing servers can be a headache). Despite some clear advantages, none of these different frameworks is inherently better. They all have tradeoffs. If Microsoft were to come to me and (with a large check) demand that I use ASP MVC, I would do so.
My first response reading your comment is that you have less experience than I do with software engineering. That may be untrue and unfair, but rash responses are correlated with inexperience from my career. I would ask you to consider your strong, aggressive reaction as unhealthy for merit-based engineering decisions. Learning and respecting that most decisions in software are about tradeoffs and not black-and-write-strictly-better-or-worse I believe will help you in your career. Furthermore, I hope you eventually come to point where you realize many of these different languages and frameworks all look the same after a while :) It's not until we can tell a computer what we what and it figures out how that our productivity will massively improve.