The reason Angular JS will fail

I agree with this post. The worst thing about Angular is how confusing it is, particularly when it does not have to be at all. There are at least 10 things I can think of off the top of my head that are so confusing about Angular that could easily be much simpler that it tells me the framework creators must not care about understandabiltiy at all. I think for a JS framework this is a death wish, but we'll see.

Just some examples:

1. When you create a directive you initialize it with one of three different kinds of scopes. A parent scope (which is the actual controller scope object), a child scope (which prototypically inherits from the controller scope), or an isolate scope (which is an isolated scope with inheritance only to rootScope). If you don't explicitly define a scope you get a parent scope. If you write `scope: true` you get a child scope. If you write `scope: {}` you get an isolate scope. This is so fucking confusing for beginners. Why not just explicitly define what kind of scope you want so it's clear?

2. Every single example of learn AngularJS online, even examples from the 'official documentation' (that's in quotes because Angular's documentation is so atrocious that referring to it as documentation would be bastardizing the English language) give you examples of defining services, controllers and directives directly on the top-level ng-app module when in reality doing this is catastrophic and will make your app IMPOSSIBLE to unit test. You need to define services in their own modules that get aggregated into the ng-app module so you can unit test them, but there are no examples of that anywhere.

3. Speaking of unit testing, because it's supposed to be so easy in Angular right? You have this thing called angular.mock.module that's the key to everything. Now 'angular.mock.module' is different from 'angular.module' but is for some reason aliased to 'module' because that's not confusing or anything. Now you would expect for angular.mock.module to be just that, a mock module. BUT it's actually a module that depends on the angular 'ng' module meaning that it's not really a mock module at all, it's a module that includes the ENTIRE working Angular library. So you can use the 'mock' module to get the REAL injector and use that to get your REAL services which you put into the mock module to use in your tests. The entire flow is so confusing and non-descriptive that it's a wonder a beginner is ever even able to write a working unit test much less a good one. The funny part is all you hear about is "unit testing is so easy in Angular omgz" when really it's confusing as fuck but the Angular crew seems completely oblivious to that fact.

--- I could honestly write a book about my Angular rants, this is just barely skimming the surface, but the point is, Angular makes things hard and confusing when they don't need to be. I like the way Angular organizes code, but I'm willing to switch at the drop of a dime if something simpler comes along.

I'm going to trust your opinion clearly as you built this: http://okmaya.com/clean-php/clean-php-step-1/

Simpler, yes, but simplicity often comes at the expense of power. What happens in a year, when you have a bunch of experienced developers, struggling to overcome the limitations of ReactJS? Most likely you'll end up reinventing many of the things that Angular provides out of the box.

It is always tempting to take short-term gains over long-term costs, and in some situations, it may be the right thing to do. A company that gets a product out of the door in a couple of months using ReactJS may beat a company that spends 12 months building a "better" one with AngularJS. But the reverse may happen instead: The company that adopted a simpler technology may become bogged down trying to extend beyond its limitations, giving their competitors a chance to accelerate past them.

It's the old story of the tortoise and the hare. Except, as with any fable, real life is never so clear-cut, and gains in one area will almost always be countered by losses in another.

I don't think the argument is that jQuery can do the same things. I think the argument is that you can have two way bindings and a lot of the benefits without a lot of the complexity of Angular.

I agree that angular is difficult and docs poor. I think knockout has great docs and is easy to learn. But google trend both and clearly angular is winning and probably has won the mvc js battle. It defies logic but there it is.

50% of your article was about how jquery was superior and simpler than prototype and moo tools. It may have been superior but it's nonsense to say it was simpler. I used prototype alot and it was simpler. To grab a div you simply:

$("mydiv")

not:

$("#mydiv")

So much more elegant than jquery!

Prototype comes from a js perspective whilst jquery seems to come from a css perspective. So I think prototype is better for traditional developers and jquery for web designers.