I won't be using Angular for my next project and neither should you

gherkin 11 years ago |

Clicking the back button after going to this article prevents you from returning to HN, but rather sends you to jskicks' front page and re-opens the article.

Really shitty behavior. Or is this supposed to work better on mobile?

thesnider 11 years ago | |

Not only is it hard to read on mobile, it also somehow disables inertia scrolling, something I've never experienced on an angularjs site

robertthegrey 11 years ago | |

Good feedback - something I'll look at getting fixed asap

pavel_lishin 11 years ago | |

For me, it just keeps taking me back to the same article.

aakilfernandes 11 years ago | |

Actually completely unreadable on mobile

mmilano 11 years ago |

The Sharepoint experience comparison is pretty pointless. The complaint is that he's being consulted to fix things un-qualified people broke. Sounds like, consulting.

I haven't put food on the table with Sharepoint consulting, but "broken installations" can be done via the GUI by employees with admin access right? ... where breaking AngularJS apps would be done by those with access to the code. Very different.

Then what type of consulting doesn't feel like selling your soul when you've achieved a significant level of expertise in an area?

Pretty dramatic, but interesting bits none the less.

lgunsch 11 years ago |

He talks about "Juniors learning bad habbits," but fails to meantion what any of those habbits are. It sounds like he thinks its over engineered.

gnrlbzik 11 years ago |

I must say my gut reaction to such titles is usually rejection of premiss. But I must say article is well written and on point. Time will tell.

craigching 11 years ago | |

Personally I would have liked more concrete examples of the problem he's outlined. For instance, his assertion that it teaches junior programmers bad habits. Like what? I'm not sure that's been my experience, but I'm a seasoned JavaScript developer and understand what's going on under the covers. I really would like to better understand that if I use Angular and expose it to my junior programmers, what problems am I likely to encounter so that I can counter them? That would have made this article much more useful to me. It appears to be just a screed without any concrete examples.

artjumble 11 years ago | | |

Agreed. It is hard to just accept these viewpoints without backing them up with some examples or data.

The v2 opinion and comparison to SharePoint just sounds mostly like FUD.

The comments about junior devs and masquerading as javascript I just don't buy. Sure someone new to programming might be able to just throw something together and not learn, but someone attempting to learn will still learn a lot using Angular.

gnrlbzik 11 years ago | | |

Well I can relate to notion. Not to the exact manner. But when I had a small team and we worked on app, about 2.5 years ago. I would say that general premise was in regards of PRs that i have reviewed, is that more junior devs, would over populated logic in templates and in general just do little bit of extra code in places where it should of not existed. That said, I think it is applicable to any junior developer, when documentation is a bit convoluted. I can't say that Angular has the best documentation and has no ramp up time to get on board with it, if anything it has longer ramp up time. Especially if you start from scratch as a team.

robertthegrey 11 years ago | | |

You've hit the nail on the head, but I honestly don't know why more senior developers can't see it - unless they don't actually work with juniors on a regular basis? Anyway, due to all the cries about FUD on the topic of juniors specifically, I decided it needs its own writeup - you can find it here if you want more clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965935

craigching 11 years ago | | |

Actually I work pretty closely with my juniors and teach them the right way to do it. That and provide a code base of conventions that shows them the right way to do it. It's really hard for me to understand how you let juniors get to the point of having bad habits. If you see them doing something wrong, let them know, provide them feedback telling them why what they did was wrong and show them how to do it right. It's really not that hard, just part of the job.

Any technology (not just Angular) has the potential to be misused. As a senior developer/architect it's my job to review and mentor my teammates as appropriate. I don't really see this as a problem particular to Angular, it's something you have to watch out for everywhere.

craigching 11 years ago | | |

Thank you, that example makes sense. You see, as an experienced developer I would never think to intertwine my logic into my templates, so it's hard to envision what a junior developer might do.

gnrlbzik 11 years ago | | |

Do agree with you on that. My use of "on point" is probably too strong for this article. Better would be mostly on point. Examples are missing. And does feel more like fud when certain points are discussed.

ufo 11 years ago |

Is it really true that the order you write html attributes/directives in angular matters? That was pretty surprising for me.

artjumble 11 years ago | |

After looking at the linked article and reading the comments, it appears that it doesn't make an actual impact on performance. He is just suggesting the ordering for consistency.

robertthegrey 11 years ago | | |

I don't know how you can say that when in his article he clearly says:

"In AngularJS, not all HTML attributes are equal; some have no significant effect; others have a profound impact on how your page is rendered."

If it was just about consistency, then it would for part of an Angular style guide that so many companies produce.

malandrew 11 years ago |

Check out mercury. It, react and mithril are the only sane choices.

senoff 11 years ago |

Yep. Robert's a crack dev and I found his insights on the issues with Angular spot on.