Hacker News Reader

Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

ugh- how is Angular so popular?

I think it's standing in the industry scratches the enterprise itch, so it's popular amongst professionals and corporates. You can't get fired for picking Angular, in other words.

As to how it came to be in that standing, it was and likely still is a very powerful platform.

I recently wrote an embed widget for a client, a simple 5 field form with some dynamic drop-down changing and a date picker. 40/50 lines of js maybe with a simple date picker (pickadate I think).

The client showed me a couple of examples of what they wanted.

One used Angular to make the widget. For a 5 field form that transitions to a "thanks, your order is accepted" div.

Personally, I would consider firing any-one who thought using angular in that scenario is a sensible thing to do.

Sometimes this can be a case of Maslow's hammer, though - if you work for a shop where they've standardised on Angular (or whatever) as their go-to solution for everything, you can end up with massive overkill in some scenarios while, overall, it's probably still cost-effective and perhaps somewhat sensible to have a standardised approach.

I say this as someone who is no fan of Angular or of this sort of attitude in general - but, on the other hand, I have many times seen the harm that results from in-house micro-frameworks (which tend to be poorly documented, poorly tested, overly specific, and a disaster waiting to happen when the in-house expert decides to get a job somewhere else).

Completely agree, you don't need a framework at all for a task like that. We have had some pretty crazy implementations of simple static sites. One had not a single line of HTML as it was all template engine tags instead, that one was silly.

thanks for taking my question seriously. seems like the only really good answer.

but of course, "enterprisey" has never really been a good litmus for "correct" or "sane" or "efficient". it's not a coincidence the Java ecosystem became the brunt of so many jokes. i can't help but wonder how seriously it would have been taken if it weren't a Google project.

In fairness, your question hardly reads as a question and much more like a halfhearted sigh from someone who hasn't given it much thought.

In response to the mention of Google backing it, I don't see how how that should discredit it in the slightest. Sure you don't see anyone getting fired for choosing Angular. That's because it's supported by a business that runs the business on it. In this case, a company filled with some of the best engineers in the business. It also was and is damn good at certain things. Pretty sensible choice.

"In fairness, your question hardly reads as a question and much more like a halfhearted sigh from someone who hasn't given it much thought."

the connotations are your own. :) the problems with Angular have been beaten to death and i didn't think i needed to include them to foster a conversation. i'm sure i'm not the only one surprised by the graph in the post [0].

even the article that OP links to- "The State of JavaScript: Front-End Frameworks" [1]- would beg the same question. if we take it's research seriously- more people want to learn React. less than half of surveyed Angular users say they would use it again. there is a discrepancy between that survey and Angular's popularity. i think my question is fair. i think dismissing it requires less thought than asking it.

in any case, i didn't say that Google's involvement discredits it. quite the opposite really. a lot of people will admit it's the only reason they've taken it seriously.

[0] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*gmYPusm1EjWu713tmV...

[1] https://medium.com/@sachagreif/the-state-of-javascript-front...

It's makes no difference if it's a google project.

It fulfills a need, and works.

Just because you have a preference for something else doesn't make it any less effective.

Because it solves real world business problems. Some people need to build large systems in a SPA framework and Angular is good at this.

Not everyone is building a cheap hackathon twitter clone in their spare time.

For some of us the JS framework is solving business problems, not hobby JS side projects using the latest hip JS frameworks.

> Because it solves real world business problems. Some people need to build large systems in a SPA framework

This sounds...circular. "AngularJS is a framework for building large SPA framework systems solves the real world business problem that business need to build SPA framework systems."

Frameworks don't solve business problems, practically by definition; they're potentially the common factor across software systems that solves part of the technical problems of developing an application.

That's assuming a framework is any good, of course, but we're talking about Angular, so by all means: tell us what development problems Angular solves for you.

And if I were defending Angular, I don't know that I'd invoke the problems of fashionability and the bleeding-edge of change, because it's hardly insulated.

I think you're wrong, but only because you went in the wrong direction. In my experience Angular is best for the "I don't care how, I just need it done" crowd. The architecture, data model, routing setup, etc are all defined for you. However I've found React/Vue/Ember are better for "I need to create a complex system with a long shelf-life that will be touched by many people".

do you answer questions this way in real life or only on the net under alt accounts?

Because it appeals to programmers coming from a background in C# and Java. It can feel out of place to programmers used to jQuery and Node but it's very appealing to the enterprise mindset.

Mind you, there are people using Angular outside the enterprise (e.g. via Ionic), but it's definitely one of its main strengths.

For anyone wondering: detractors criticise Angular for relying on a lot of idiomatic concepts (compared to other frameworks that largely build on concepts that apply to JS in general) and creating a lot of abstractions to the point where Angular can be considered its own language (as is certainly the case with its template language despite people saying it's "just HTML"). All of these things are the way they are for good reasons, it just makes Angular entirely unappealing to a subset of the JS community. Luckily there are plenty other frameworks to choose from.

Personally I value mature, well understood solutions. Angular delivers that and the ecosystem around it is finally about there. I can use ui-bootstrap (Angular material not as much) on a relatively large application without running into defects at every step. And there is an enormously high probability that the answer to any issue my team runs into is one Google away.

I'd much rather stay on the well beaten path with a mature, less sexy, less efficient solution than hack my way through the jungle with something more contemporary and powerful but less mature and less well understood.

Because is a Built-in solution. I have not to look for extension libraries like I have with react, and everytime try to choose between a lot of crap alternatives to a single functionality I need on react. I just pick Angular and everything I need is already inside that framework, far far far less headaches.

Pivotal labs chose it a few years back and all the enterprise wonks haven't turned back.

Speaking as a Pivotal Labs employee who has done a shitload of Angular 1 development, this is not true. I still like Angular personally, but enthusiasm is definitely way higher in the React direction unless the client demands we do something else.

This comment reads like a HipsterHacker tweet

show me on the doll where the framework touched you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com