I really don't want to sound like an ass, but if you were at the stage of 'learning AJAX' a couple of months ago you are probably not in a position to judge the merits of JS frameworks like React, Vue or Angular.
Those frameworks/libraries don't write themselves.
This is really aggravated that -- as opposed to native GUI libraries -- frontend requirements vary wildly. You might just need it to embellish some elements (i.e. the jquery level), you might also use it to build some large desktop app replacement.
Which is why I take most comparisons with a large grain of salt. In this regard, "JS framework XYZ sucks/rules" is the new "PHP is great/awful".
Which often has the same end result, with a bit of added customization and some hard choices way too early.
Edit: removed a brash statement.
I am hardly an expert on either Angular/Vue to recommend them based on their internals, I stated my experience, of course, the final decision depends on those who choose one framework over another.
Some tools are harder than others, sometimes because they accomplish more.
Imagine if you'd said "one day into learning about homeopathy, I was able to prescribe homeopathy-things, but after 4-5 weeks of med school I was still taking classes about blood cells."
I'm not actually defending Angular as such, because I am super ignorant about it. Perhaps Angular is a byzantine mess. But there are many great tools which do not have smooth onboarding procedures, which are still valuable because of how they work on complicated projects.
Of course, the BEST tools make easy things easy and hard things possible. Angular might (or might not) make hard things possible, but I think everyone agrees it's not particularly good at making easy things easy.
I get your point, I removed the last statement, it was incorrect. the thing is, I wanted to state that Vue is super easy to use, now, if it is a toy or a serious framework is upto the programmer to decide :-)
How easy it is to get up and running with a framework doesn't actually tell me that much about the framework. Is the apparent simplicity simply an artefact of a huge layer of magic that I will end up fighting 4 months down the row?
A good example for this is actually the much maligned Angular 1, two-way data binding looks easy on the surface, but it comes with a cost. And guess what, two-way data binding was all the rage for a while in the HN echo chamber during the early days of Ember, Angular and Knockout.
In the end, whether you use Angular, React or Vue is really secondary to what you build with it. You can create shitty and good code with all of them.
Now, specifically about Angular2+. People act as if its approach was this awful, monstrous abomination. This all really depends on your circumstance tho, or not? There are instances where it makes perfect sense to tailor your setup and use a libraries-first approach. But if you do this, let's say in React, you need to make a lot of decisions up front. Do you want manage state? How? Redux? MobX? What about message buses? Do you want to use Flow? Just ES6 / Babel? TypeScript? What about routing? Lazy-loading? What about bundling? Webpack? Rollup? And so on.
Now, if you are part of a heterogenous developer team working in an enterprise shop, maybe you are happy to know that there is a framework that has made a lot of decisions already for you and prevents you from having to discuss the initial setup for 2 months, but at the same time is flexible enough to be adapted to your needs (I mean, this even applies to experienced front-end shops, there's nothing more horrible than endless discussions about shit like pure ES6 vs Flow vs TypeScript from senior devs). On top of that it uses patterns that you already know, such as dependency injection and annotations. While you personally might not feel at ease with this, many developers do.
> In the end, whether you use Angular, React or Vue is really secondary to what you build with it.
yes and no, you are also making a tradeoff at the learning curve of the chosen framework.
1. The documentation is excellent. It's short enough to read in one sitting and comprehensive in that every option is documented without needing to resort to third party websites. When a new feature is added even in a minor version upgrade, that new feature is in the documentation (and marked as NEW). The search is also great and separates results into "Guide" and "API" categories.
2. Vue itself is extremely cohesive and user friendly. User friendly can mean many things. One of those is simply terminology. For example, in both Angular and Vue, templates can have child content. AngularJS and Angular use the terms Transclusion and Content Projection while Vue templates can have "slots": a term which doesn't require a CS degree to understand the intent.
The Angular documentation is simply not good: the organization, navigation, search, and writing style are vastly inferior to Vue's docs. Many sections are written in tutorial form repeating the same information (or mentioning important information in an unrelated section). It's hard to find what you're looking for and in many cases things simply aren't documented. For instance, speaking of Content Projection, it's a major feature and it's nearly impossible to find in the docs unless you already know ahead of time that it's called "Content Projection". I had to learn about it from a third party blog which made me question if it was even safe to use. There's even an open JIRA item noting this:
https://github.com/angular/angular.io/issues/3099
Other things that bit me recently were key modifiers in which the possible options are only mentioned on the github issue page (not in the docs).