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Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

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Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, it is incompatible with the whole open web stack. You cannot use Bootstrap with it. And if you decide to move off Angular, you are going to be in a world of pain. Second and worst of all - it is a monolithic framework. As long as you just do things the "Angular Way" - you are fine. If you want to change or override something, you are in a world of pain. If you are learning Angular - you are hardly learning J…

No Boostrap? The project I recently worked on must not have happened, and it must have all been a dream... Are there non-monolithic frameworks? I believe that's the main value proposition of using a framework: you don't need to think about how to organize things because it's the framework's job to provide you with square and round holes, all you have to do is provide the square and round pegs. I am not saying that fr…

> Lastly, Angular has something that many other frameworks don't: a commercial backer. This means that it's not likely to just bitrot on GitHub for years when the original author loses interest.

Google's track record is hardly impeccable in this regard.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#102
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article only did one thing for me - demonstrate that the author himself doesn't understand Angular or the problems. I don't know Angular that well myself, but the author knew anything more than I did, he'd be able to spend the extra 30 seconds to write the refactored code. Dismiss this article. It's a waste of time and energy. In fact, I really shouldn't even be wasting my time commenting on it.

>This article only did one thing for me - demonstrate that the author himself doesn't understand Angular or the problems. Seems pretty evident from the horrible jankiness of this blog. Heavy as shit and it loads on the 5th try.

It just says "Loading" on the latest version of Chrome with zero plugins...

And now it says 500

> Error details are currently disabled. Please set StaticConfiguration.DisableErrorTraces = false; to enable.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#104
post #87

I am not a web developer but I have been trying to keep up with the technology. I tried learning Angular because people at work started using and hyping it beyond measure. So I thought 'ok' this got to be really good stuff. And it was good, _if_ experienced people held my hand. Otherwise I got lost in a soup of what seemed like unnecessary terminology -- $scopes, controllers, digest cycles, dependency injections, dir…

I'm an experienced front-end developer and I spent some months working on an Angular app. My experience was much like yours - way too many concepts to contend with and an overall "enterprisey" feel. I also think the dirty-checking and digest cycle was a pretty serious mistake.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Boostrap? The project I recently worked on must not have happened, and it must have all been a dream... Are there non-monolithic frameworks? I believe that's the main value proposition of using a framework: you don't need to think about how to organize things because it's the framework's job to provide you with square and round holes, all you have to do is provide the square and round pegs. I am not saying that fr…

> Lastly, Angular has something that many other frameworks don't: a commercial backer. This means that it's not likely to just bitrot on GitHub for years when the original author loses interest. Google's track record is hardly impeccable in this regard.

Python 3 support for protocol buffers comes to mind... It may be there now, I've not looked recently, but I know it has languished.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#106

The central problem with Angular is what is says about the software industry in general - that a framework so fundamentally and ridiculously flawed could invite such wide appeal suggests that many people have absolutely no idea what they are doing. The thousand monkeys approach to engineering has wide implications for security and safety of systems that we rely on. There is simply no way that you can say that you kno…

I think what alot of people don't think about is that "proper / correct engineering principles" don't necessarily translate to creating successful projects / companies.

If your goal is to nitpick about the reasons why a specific framework is not right for the job, then "mission accomplished".

If your goal is to create amazing products / services. And are willing to do anything to accomplish that, then sadly I think you're on the wrong side of the argument.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#107
post #26
post #7

The page is not loading properly for me (on a Windows laptop with Chrome). When I use the given link I get "500 - InternalServerError Something went horribly, horribly wrong while servicing your request. We're sorry :-(" and when I go via javascriptkicks.com it keeps loading and never completes.

After I turned off µBlock, it loaded alright(Chrome/OSX 10.8). I know a lot of people here love them an adblocker, so that might be the problem. It seems to be blocking a JSONP call somewhere, and thus the loader spins forever...

Only `google-analytics.com` is blocked when using default filter lists. The 500 error appears to be random, I got it both with and without uBlock.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#108

I wish I could go back in time and strongly oppose AngularJS at the last place I worked. Knowing what I know now, it was such a bad idea. I also made the mistake of adding it to a resume, too, so I have gotten too many recruiter emails about AngularJS jobs. AngularJS has an amazing success/failure story. The developers have managed to get their technology used by so many web development teams whilst being extremely o…

I have the same feeling, except there was actually no debating it. Everyone used the phrase that Angular is the future of web development, even the back-end .NET people who only play with JS when the fancy strikes. Even the product people.

I didn't even try to mount a serious inquiry or evaluation - it was like an opinion steamroller. I really hated that feeling, but I was actually okay with the choice at the time because I wanted to learn Angular. I just remember being spooked by the total consensus that it was what we would use.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#109
post #87

I am not a web developer but I have been trying to keep up with the technology. I tried learning Angular because people at work started using and hyping it beyond measure. So I thought 'ok' this got to be really good stuff. And it was good, _if_ experienced people held my hand. Otherwise I got lost in a soup of what seemed like unnecessary terminology -- $scopes, controllers, digest cycles, dependency injections, dir…

Unfortunately, that issue isn't limited to angular: it falls under the general category of "If you haven't gotten burned by the problems a pattern is trying to solve, a pattern looks like unnecessary complexity." I'm reminded of when I had to learn COM back in the day; as a developer who had cut their teeth on programming on Macintosh followed by Debian, it seemed like needless complexity until I grasped the zen of t…

I strongly disagree. The idea of a directive isn't unnecessarily complex because it isn't needed. And yes, there should be a pattern to force their use, for exactly the reasons you specified.

The claim that's being lobbied against Angular, however, is that they were schizophrenic in their choice of implementations for all of their patterns, or to state it another way, that the same advantages could have been gained with much, much simpler patterns. Instead of building a nice clean framework, they built an auto-magical framework, and declared you must learn every workaround in the "Angular Way" to use it.

There are plenty of js frameworks now, many of which have analogous components to directives and controllers and views, etc. But while most, if not all of them, allow for the same advantages you've mentioned, few of them do so in such a complicated, boilerplate, and arbitrary manner.

And this is scary, because it looks like they're continuing this trend with a completely new "Angular 2.0 Way".

I'm going to go off the deep end here for a moment, but, back when I was in college, I took some marketing class where they discussed in depth the idea of user interface as a method of product lockin. The idea was if you built a product simple enough, but then obfuscated the correct method of usage correctly, you could make a product that was simple enough that new comers would be drawn to your product, but complicated enough that it would take so much time to master, that most who did so would actively desire never to leave as they were now the local experts. SharePoint really is a poster-child for this sort of dark design. And I think of this every single time I use angular, not because the ideas are wrong, but because of what simple things were implemented in a complicated manner, and what others were made auto-magical.

Re: Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

#110
MVVM has been around for years and years. It's just newish to the JS scene.

It is painful to read articles like this where even the author misunderstands the pattern and failed to read some of the standard literature on the topic. Just because MVVM is hip now does not mean everyone needs to reinvent wheels.

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