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Comment by water42 | Hacker News Reader

Angular 2 to Angular 4 is not a good example of getting comfortable using something then the next version coming out. They are the same framework and it is trivial to upgrade Angular 2 to Angular 4. "Updating to 4 is as easy as updating your Angular dependencies to the latest version, and double checking if you want animations. This will work for most use cases." from https://angularjs.blogspot.com/2017/03/angular-400-now-avail...

Angular 1 to Angular 2/4 is a valid argument though.

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Boy, nothing says "This upgrade is a totally backward compatible drop-in replacement for Angular 2" like not only bumping a major version number but actually skipping over the usual increment entirely.

(Not that this is really substantial -- it's the history of the project that not only warrants but demands skepticism on the ease of both the upgrade and the utility and learning curve. The tone-deaf nature of the upgrade number is simply frosting on the cake.)

It's true, the nature of the changes from angular 2 to angular 4 are actually smaller and easier to deal with than some of the changes between beta release candidates. But now we're poised to be able to actually build some applications without so much infrastructure change.

I agree that skepticism is important, but this is honestly really straightforward if you've been following the development and community discussion. IMO the Angular team made it rather clear why they were skipping the 3rd increment (router package was on 3 and they wanted all of the packages to be at the same increment) and that upgrading version numbers was just semantic versioning and not releasing of a new framework like Angular 1 to 2 was. There were also a few popular articles explaining that no one should be freaking out over the 2 to 4 change and a lot of discussion on HN.

So at this point, a few months into Angular 4, it's simply wrong to make the comment that the OP made.

You are right, but it does lead to additional complexity in terms of using available documentation and examples. A big part of the efficiencies we have today is the ability to leverage multiple libraries to get things done.

I wanted to leverage Firebase, but the examples available were for Angular 1 at the time. Angular 2 support was new enough that I was blazing my own trail. RxJS was undergoing major upheaval as well. Using Redux ideas in Angular 2 (NGRX) is/was in a state of flux. Everything is in a state of change; when you find examples of how to integrate things, typically one or more of the libraries you're working with are at a slightly different level than the things you've already integrated into your codebase from the last set of examples and best practices you integrated.

I'm not saying the situation is impossible, just that it introduces additional friction and difficulty compared to working with a more mature less cutting edge toolset.

Yeah the SEO for Angular is honestly a nightmare.

I can't search Angular since then I get AngularJS (Angular 1) results even though the current iteration of the framework is called Angular. I can't search Angular 4 to filter Angular 1 out since not many articles are labeled with Angular 4 yet. I can't search for Angular 2 since new articles for Angular 4 are not going to be labeled with Angular 2, and searching for Angular 2 includes tons of useless media about Angular at various stages of release candidate.

/rant but I guess most of the time I'm just reading the Angular docs anyways.

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