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Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

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Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#171

Post by flukus »

ng12 wrote: post #165
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…

Uhm, why can't we have both? Sure, Mr. Bakery, do everything in jQuery in a tag. I'd even argue that's probably the correct approach. But I don't work for a bakery -- I work for a large company with a complex tech stack writing web applications that will have to be maintained by some poor sucker long after I move on. Tools like React/Angular, Webpack, and npm allow me to do that in a way I couldn't as little as 3-4 y…

> But I don't work for a bakery -- I work for a large company with a complex tech stack writing web applications that will have to be maintained by some poor sucker long after I move on.

Or rewritten because the flavor of the month has changed.

>Tools like React/Angular, Webpack, and npm allow me to do that in a way I couldn't as little as 3-4 years ago.

What exactly couldn't you do 3-4 years ago that you can now?

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#172

Post by WalterSear »

Bahamut wrote: post #116
WalterSear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfinished? How about never finished. >Angular 2 is going to have breaking changes only every 6 months from now on. So the next one would be around February with Angular 3. Yes exactly, they’re also finally switching to semantic versioning which is a huge win in my opinion. IMHO, breaking changes every six months is the recipe for an shitshow of an ecosystem. http://juristr.com/blog/2016/09/ng2-released/

I'd like to point out that React has had breaking changes roughly 6 or less months apart also. This is a red herring of an argument, we see lots of successful libraries make breaking changes that often doing fine. The scope of the breaking changes matter more, and that story has yet to be told.

That's a really good point, that I should have been aware of.

The more I reflect, the more I see this as about poor expectation management and messaging from the Angular team than an actual story.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#173

Post by flukus »

untog wrote: post #125
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…

jQuery isn't dead - they're still releasing new versions. You can still do everything you used to be able to. But now you can also do more - you can sensibly modularise your code. Virtual DOMs bring huge performance boosts with very little work. IMO, the JavaScript ecosystem has matured. Sometimes in weird ways that aren't great, but it's still better to have an irritating package manager than no package manager at a…

It's also a lot less necessary than it was because browser compatibility has improved. Last time I did a mobile web app I seriously considered removing it because it was heavyweight and I was only using a few functions. I didn't, due to time constraints, but I could have.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#174

Post by barryhoodlum »

flukus wrote: post #168
barryhoodlum wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading a blog post where a guy had written about Steve Reich and Brian Eno's experiments and his attempts at replicating them. It was posted on HN a few days ago: http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music.... There are embedded YouTube videos, MP3s, and code samples to illustrate what he's writing about. He's implemented their ideas using the Web Audio API and you can run the code from w…

> It's a real testament to how great the web can be Doing something in a browser that we could do 30 years ago on a desktop isn't that great a testament.

But you're clicking on a link, not downloading and installing an application.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#175

Post by WalterSear »

seangrogg wrote: post #162
WalterSear wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This release cycle is fine so long as you don't rely on anything but Angular 2. As soon as you rely on packages that support Angular 2, the 'good and ready' argument breaks, since you can't start till all the packages you rely upon have already made the upgrade, and you can't take to long either, because you can't expect further work or fixes to be made to older versions of the packages. 12-month breaking changes, th…

This makes the improper assumption that you're forced to upgrade. The code for Angular 2 will not evaporate when Angular 3 appears - at that point the choice to upgrade to the latest version is just that: a choice. You are free to wait until Angular 4 comes out before you adopt Angular 3 if you want to make sure the ecosystem around it is solidified.

I've been 'forced to upgrade' in the past by issues in dependencies that won't be fixed, with other dependencies not updated yet. It's a sticky wicket.

That said, breaking changes every six months seems to be commonplace in major open source packages. My initial reaction was 'OMG, now they want to repeat the Angular 2 debacle every 6 months?!?', which doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#176

Post by flukus »

RKoutnik wrote: post #82
WalterSear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfinished? How about never finished. >Angular 2 is going to have breaking changes only every 6 months from now on. So the next one would be around February with Angular 3. Yes exactly, they’re also finally switching to semantic versioning which is a huge win in my opinion. IMHO, breaking changes every six months is the recipe for an shitshow of an ecosystem. http://juristr.com/blog/2016/09/ng2-released/

One other project comes to mind that also updates every six months: Ubuntu. Last I checked, their ecosystem was doing fairly well. I wouldn't consider Ubuntu "unfinished" unless we're talking about the state of all software everywhere.

To update an app for the latest ubuntu, the worst case scenario is that you have to recompile.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#177

Post by flukus »

fernandopj wrote: post #114
SwellJoe wrote: post #81

I've pretty much had the same experience with the JavaScript back end. The npm ecosystem is overwhelming, on several fronts. In many ways, it's great: 70,000+ libraries available with one command. But, my gods...grokking how they all interact, getting a stack of several libraries to work together, and rolling that stack into production, are astronomically more complicated than any other language/platform I've ever us…

IMHO the Node/npm ecosystem is far more stable than Angular 1&2/bower. Node core modules have been remarkably stable since 0.12.x, so most of npm packages one would install are libraries, with very narrow responsibilities. A few popular frameworks have also been fairly stable and well understood (Express, Bluebird). With Angular, you also have a myriad of libraries available to you, easily pluggable via Angular DI, b…

> IMHO the Node/npm ecosystem is far more stable than Angular 1&2/bower.

I can't say if it's more stable than bower, but IME it's not stable at all. My simple blog static site generator breaks every time I write a new blog post.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#178

Post by flukus »

vertex-four wrote: post #14
lghh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sort of the problem that the article was addressing. By the time things have been built, they are old news to the JS community - or at least those that you see on HN, Medium, blogs, etc. If you mention learning Angular 1 anywhere you get shouted at that it's old and should not be used and to instead look at Angular 2 and React. By the time those are established, it'll be on to something else. And that isn't ju…

On the other hand, frameworks like Ember are still chugging along quite happily, and swallowing up any actually good ideas the rest of the community has. For example, isomorphic apps spawned "fastboot", where with one plugin you can generate an isomorphic app from your existing Ember project (with some tweaking), talking to your existing API server.

Knockout is stall my goto, ember seems pretty similar to this. I still don't see what angular react bring to the table that isn't mush simpler with these tools.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#179

Post by stephenhuey »

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.

And the number of Aurelia users is rapidly rising not only because it's new and shiny and easier to build complex web apps, but also because it's more natural and standards-compliant than frameworks such as Angular. A natural reaction to seeing what's missing or going down the wrong path (as in the case of Angular 2).

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#180

Post by flukus »

barryhoodlum wrote: post #174
flukus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a real testament to how great the web can be Doing something in a browser that we could do 30 years ago on a desktop isn't that great a testament.

But you're clicking on a link, not downloading and installing an application.

You are downloading an application, arguably installing one temporarily too.

Is this that much more efficient than "apt-get install foo"?

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