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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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