Congratulations to the Angular 2 team on shipping before Christmas. The estimate was originally somewhere around early 2016, so this is a huge deal for them to get this out before the year was up. Unfortunately, Angular 2 launched into beta too late. In the amount of time that Angular 2 has taken to get to beta, ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken developers by storm with its simplistic component based approach.

Unlike React, Google does not really treat Angular as a first-class citizen because they have such split focus and conflicting React like library for web components called Polymer. They provide some resources, but nowhere near the amount of resources that Facebook throws behind React and React Native.

Now lets talk about the fact that the Angular 2 project got off to a shaky start and I know they actually rewrote various parts from scratch more than once (hence why it took so long to reach beta, approximately 2 years). That horrible templating syntax needs to be mentioned, the decision to use square and rounded brackets for binding events/data and using things like asterisks in my opinion makes Angular 2 fall into the same trap that Angular 1 did in regards to developer accessibility.

I am really loving TypeScript these days and I think the decision to support it as a first-class citizen out-of-the-box was a good one (the partnership with Microsoft definitely paid off). But with that said, I think Rob Eisenberg (of Durandal fame) beat the Angular 2 team to the punch in the small space of a year in releasing his framework Aurelia (http://aurelia.io). It is what Angular 2 should have been in my opinion. Nice syntax, convention over configuration and a breeze to use.