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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken develo

Do you have a citation for that? I still see tons of user land projects using angular 1.

Yeah, you're right not to trust statements about projects "capturing mind share" and what is "really hot right now" (not intending to quote OP). People get into their little communities and don't realize that they are not at all representative of the larger world. To make something up, I can totally believe that React is really popular in the San Diego startup scene, but it's a mistake to extrapolate that too far in any dimension. Add to that confirmation bias on the part of people seeing these trends, and everything could be taking over at the same time.

As a counterpoint, there are a decent number of people learning it around where I am in southeast Michigan. There was a conference in Detroit, they said that they got a ton of React talk submissions. I used it at a small business print shop, admittedly they just let IT do their own thing.

I think there are probably still more Angular devs, but I'll be interested to see how it evolves in the next few years.

But this can be countested ad nauseum via continously moving on to the next place.

I don't doubt that you've found a lot of people in your area who are interested in it. But it doesn't even imply that it's more popular than Angular in SE MI, much less anywhere else. You can't offer up another anecdote and pretend that it's data.

And I'm sure you did fine work, but small business print shops are not exactly industry trend setters. What difference would it make in the bigger picture if you had chosen Handlebar for that project?

This is very true. A lot of people also forget that a ton of stuff that is developed never shows up in your favorite search engine. Intranets, internal apps, and so on.

We need a service that compares how software solutions are perceived.

Sometimes you have questions on StackOverflow that compare eg Angular with React, and they usually raise a lot of good points, but they are missing several dimensions:

* the products evolve, but the SO answers often don't

* the trends change as well, so what was seen as best practice 1yr ago may not be well regarded now

* you do not have an objective representation of how many people are actually supporting each technology

I think there's definitely something to be done in that space.

I am not talking about market share, I am more referring to sentiment in the community towards React. Just based on my observations, front-end developers love React and many more seemingly warming up to it. Considering React is still a new library, give it some time, but it does not take a trend to see that it is gaining popularity while Angular 1.x has peaked in my opinion and 2.0 will take a lot of convincing to get people to use it.

I personally use React and Node.js for a lot of the stuff I work on these days (both professionally and freelance projects). I know a lot of developers who use React, so while a Google search (not exactly scientific either in my opinion) yields low use of React, just based on the circle that I frequent, there are a lot of people using React and in 2016 we will see more people using it. The last two freelance projects I worked on (for pretty large companies) were built using React, word is travelling fast.

A lot of people are using Angular 1.x, but I know for a fact that not all of them will migrate over to 2.0 when the time comes. The learning curve might be smaller, but Angular 2 still falls into the trap of being over engineered in certain parts (like template syntax).

I completely share your sentiments. I am currently an Angular 1.X guy myself with limited knowledge of React. However given the little knowledge I have of React vs. Angular 2.X I find it more likely my team would migrate to React than Angular 2 (doubly so considering the benefits offered by React native).

This mirrors my experience. I left Angular 1.x for React and would need a huge amount of convincing to learn Angular 2.x. The killer feature of React for me is the full stack approach - react, react native, relay & graphql.

Going by NPM, I'm seeing 225K downloads per week for react and 64K per week for Angular.

Unfortunately, bower does not seem to collect download stats (I assume because downloads don't go through a Bower-controlled server), and I find it very likely that react usage is strongly correlated with NPM usage. React treats bower very much as a second-class citizen, even using a separate repo for its bower repository.

I just checked Datanyze which crawls the Alexa 1m and more to see which services & libraries websites are using. They've detected 234,003 sites using Angular and 2,069 using React.

I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers. React is usually used alongside significant tooling like babel and webpack/browserify and some flux library. It's probably more complex. You can't just drop some js script file in your HTML document and go with that.

I say that as someone who thinks React is the future of JavaScript development and there's no chance I will ever go back to separate templates so Angular of whatever version is just automatically disqualified. It would be like going back in time and I do not want to do this.

Yes you can! We are using requirejs, babel,es6 to have a react setup that runs completely in the browser. But for some reason, react makes this information really obscure.

It works really well. Including breakpoints in chrome,etc.

It might work for developing, but I don't think it works well for people actually using it, it's too slow.

which is actually my point - running it this way helps us do a lot of beta testing internally,etc. Obviously this is not a production strategy, but the way we have written code (with requirejs) is that we can switch between them.

I really hope that React makes this more public - it makes it for quick and dirty prototyping. P.S. love ES6. Performance be damned!!

Care to share your setup? I.e. minimal todo-like application with both direct development and with compilation for production site.

Give me a few hours, I'll strip some stuff out.

Don't spent to much time on it, because it will be deprecated in few years. :-)

Angular 2 also requires that level of tooling (both allow you to use ES5 and don't require tooling but most devs won't use them like that).

>I think Angular is more accessible than React. I don't think React will be adopted as much by non-engineers.

Both are meant for engineers, if by that you mean developers.

For very small projects you can write react code in one or a few files without babel, webpack/browserify and similar tools. That closes the gap but I agree that angular is easier to just prototype something simple if you're not a developer.

Angular is popular among developers who make products for the kind of person who would install the Alexa toolbar.

That comment reeks of sour grapes.

I'd love to see those numbers for Ember, Polymer, Backbone and Aurelia.

52,767 for Backbone and 599 for Ember. Datanyze don't appear to be tracking Polymer or Aurelia yet.

according to similartech 927 websites using Ember and 139,844 websites using Backbone

Similartech shows 13,390 websites using React and 248,280 websites using Angular

based on HN hiring posts, more companies ask for React than Angular experience. React growth in 2015 is absolutely stunning.

http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2015/...

Is HN hiring posts REALLY representative of the industry as a whole? Seems more like the startup scene and often forgets about all the developers out there in corporations, agencies and other work that don't get represented here.

I can say that here in Denmark, the typical reaction to React will be "what is that?". On the other hand, Angular has the reassuring feeling of heavy corporate development which will make people earning their salary by working on management-sanctioned .NET technologies (that is, most developers) all warm and fuzzy.

I think, to a large extent, it depends on people's reaction to the word "framework".

Disclaimer: we switched to React at my company.

Usually startups pickup new tech and slow moving corporations follow later(whatever by buying these startups or by hiring ex-startup employees).

Here in Europe, I asked around to some firms like Aston Carter and Computerfutures recently. They had 0 requests from customers for React and A LOT for angular. Now these work mainly for enterprise companies which are hard to convince of a new technology. So all of these companies will transition much easier to angular 2 (just because they know the name 'angular') then to react.

As expected, since angular 1 came out much earlier, and have the same hype React has had for the last 2 years then.

But checking from HN, blog postings, job announcements, team posts, new turorials (video, books), etc, React seems to be winning now.

Yeah, the google trends don't seem to support that either:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20angular...

One slight issue there is that React is much less frequently referred to as reactjs compared to Angular - even down to the official project URLs.

Obviously the Google trend search for "react" has lots of false positives, but some of the major news points it picked out include references to the right react.

Well React approach of composition has reach even others programming languages and communities and with things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer.

Really, React invented the idea of composition? Please, tell me more...

I never said that invented anything, just that its ideas have reached others communities (invented originally by it or not)

> things like redux and react-hot-loader is a game changer.

Totally not inspired by Elm and traditional FRP. I mean, I use it daily and it's great, but you have to realize that a lot of what React brings to the front is bundling some well-known paradigms together.

True, but in comparison to typical, common javascript development workflows (using tools like backbone and angular) - it is a game changer.

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