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Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

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Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#81

Post by SwellJoe »

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 used. It makes the Java world seem simple.

It may settle down with time. I hope it settles down with time. JavaScript has evolved a lot just in the past couple of years, and so it feels like everybody kinda went, "Oh, wait, we're doing all of this wrong, we have to start over!" But, the ecosystem has done it several times now for almost every problem that needs solving, and it's starting to get old. At some point, shouldn't things settle on a Best Practices solution that is stable and predictable? I mean, not for everything, obviously...but, how many times and ways does, say, routing, need to be solved in incompatible ways?

I dunno. I try to just be excited about all of the amazing building blocks what I get for free when I buy into the JavaScript ecosystem...but, "free" starts to look really expensive when it is so painful to deploy it and keep it running reliably over a period of months and years.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#82

Post by RKoutnik »

WalterSear wrote: post #25
plexicle wrote: post #17

Your first foray into web development and you picked a large, unfinished (it wasn't final) framework to learn with? Then you are complaining that there were breaking changes you had to deal with? I get your beef with the ecosystem, but this is a very unfair knock on Angular 2. Angular 2 was not the problem here at all. Am I missing something obvious?

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.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#83

Post by dkarapetyan »

OskarS wrote: post #59
plexicle wrote: post #17

Your first foray into web development and you picked a large, unfinished (it wasn't final) framework to learn with? Then you are complaining that there were breaking changes you had to deal with? I get your beef with the ecosystem, but this is a very unfair knock on Angular 2. Angular 2 was not the problem here at all. Am I missing something obvious?

He didn't pick up a pre-alpha nightly build of the framework, he used the release candidate for christ's sake. A release candidate is a "release candidate", that is to say "we're pretty sure we could release this whole thing right now, but we want to send it out to the community to make sure there are no catastrophic bugs we haven't noticed". In other words feature-complete, and with most of the kinks ironed out. It'…

She.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#84

Post by mooseburger »

plexicle wrote: post #17

Your first foray into web development and you picked a large, unfinished (it wasn't final) framework to learn with? Then you are complaining that there were breaking changes you had to deal with? I get your beef with the ecosystem, but this is a very unfair knock on Angular 2. Angular 2 was not the problem here at all. Am I missing something obvious?

I did the Angular 2 TypeScript quickstart this weekend, and it bothers me that it relies heavily on Decorators, which are an experimental feature in TS (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/decorators.html).

I also recall there being around 30 issues for Angular 2 Final on github milestones the day they announced the release, but they were mysteriously gone in the afternoon.

Angular 2 Final seems to be anything but.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#85

Post by danso »

mewm wrote: post #75
Bahamut wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not any different from how Google uses Angular - Google runs off of HEAD on master, in 1 & 2

Can you enlighten me where Google uses Angular in their own apps?

Yeah I think that's the key difference: the size of the production apps. Though to be fair, Angular is a much bigger part of the front-end stack than React and not something that would be feasible to retrofit GMail/YouTube/etc. with.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#86

Post by Bahamut »

mewm wrote: post #75
Bahamut wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not any different from how Google uses Angular - Google runs off of HEAD on master, in 1 & 2

Can you enlighten me where Google uses Angular in their own apps?

I've been told directly by multiple Angular team members that over 70% of Google apps uses Angular in some fashion.

They have said the usage of Angular off of HEAD of master publicly in the past as well, but I don't recall off the top of my head where they have said this.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#87

Post by Andrex »

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…

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 programmers don't code assembly or C anymore. I'm not sure every part of the modern web stack is a universal good, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm more pleased coding on the web today than I was hacking together a Geocities page in my teenage years.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#88

Post by RussianCow »

jt2190 wrote: post #56
jkkramer wrote: post #36

It's interesting to contrast how Google and Facebook both approach open source for the web. Google tends to release code and promote it without really using it much internally first. Documentation is prolific but confusingly organized and often fragmented among several versions simultaneously (cough, Google Analytics). Facebook, on the other hand, actually seems to use their code before releasing and promoting it. Lo…

> Google tends to release code and promote it without > really using it much internally first. Is this actually true? My understanding (from watching many AngularJS presentations) is that Angular was developed with input from many teams at Google. (edit: Angular was first used on an internal app at Googel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ&feature=youtu.be... )

"with input" != actually using it. There are very few public-facing Google apps/sites that use Angular, whereas a large chunk of the Facebook frontend uses React and their other libraries like Relay. That said, I have no idea if/how Google uses Angular internally, so it might get more use than we see from the outside.

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#89

Post by Zelphyr »

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…

This is exactly why I don't buy the argument that frameworks are so much easier to use and learn than languages. I look at the state of JS these days and shake my head in disbelief. When did it get so needlessly complex? More importantly, WHY?!?!

Re: Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating

#90

Post by mewm »

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…

... and this is how major diversity spawned in the frontend business the last couple of years... Seriously, though, a lot of companies still gets it on with mediocre frontend developers that still rocks jquery solo. It might be down to down company culture or just an unlucky set of colleagues.

I'm no frontender, but lucky to be in a team that got that sh!t under control, luckily.

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