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Comment by hamstercat | Hacker News Reader

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they wouldn't work with anything higher than their current version. Turns out some services got changed between those two minor versions.

The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves. I don't see how that's a good reason. On the other hand React is being used in production right now by some of the biggest companies of the world.

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"The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google"

I say I used React, because it's made by Facebook.

They say they use Angular, because it's made by Google.

Others say, they use Ember or Vue, because it ISN'T made by a single big corp.

In the end these reasons are often meaningless and don't have any effect on the users in their whole lifetime.

It is a proxy for how likely the library will continue to exist, and how likely you can hire folks that know these libraries, in several years

Point is, people want the same (what you said) but have entirely different reasons why they would get it from their framework of choice.

Because their reasons are different, they are meaningless?

If one says A and someone else says !A they can't both be right.

Their positions are not mutually exclusive because their contexts/problems they are solving are different. So they are not saying A and !A. They are saying A and B

They can be, if both A and !A are valid choices under different scenarios or values.

I don't think it necessarily is. I know you're saying this because a language or library from a big company is likely to be dropped, but occasionally one will last a long time like Sun's Java. Just because it originates from an individual like PHP did doesn't mean for sure that it will continue to exist a long time and you'll be able to hire people.

I think you completely misinterpreted my comment

Except Google pulled a fast one with the Angular 1/2 transition. This is exactly why I'm not using Angular anymore.

The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy and isn't a real reason to use something. I use react because I like it and enjoy it, sure I have reasons behind my enjoyment, like modularity, cohesion, proactive rendering, expressive states, but mainly it feels good because there isn't as much mental translating: what the code looks like vs what the page will look like.

Having used both, they both have their strengths and weaknesses - I know both Angular and React is being used by my employer, a top 5 tech BigCo that is not Google (although I have heard there is a little React in Google floating around currently).

I’m not sure why this myth about Google not using Angular keeps propagating - I have heard it powers over 70% of Google’s frontends straight from multiple members of the Angular team. The one time AngularJS had a broken release, Google halted to a standstill.

Pete Hunt did make a great point about React avoiding the Angular 2 fiasco, although for Angular, I feel they were caught between a rock and a hard place - it probably would not be nearly as strong now if it weren’t for that choice.

I have mostly enjoyed my time with Angular 2+, and I have mostly enjoyed my time with React. I think it’s worth avoiding being quick to judge on these things, especially when the differences aren’t currently extraordinarily meaningful for most cases. When my current team was evaluating choices, we settled on React for team developer ergonomics. For some teams, that may not be React. A couple years down the line, it may be something else.

Actually it seems that Google uses both Angular 1.x, 2.x and Polymer. However it seems their newer projects use Polymer, Youtube, Google Allo, Google Music. CodeLabs and others seem to go Polymer route.

Google abandons open source projects all the time, I don't see how that is a strong argument. Facebook actually uses React, IMO Angular 2+ was built for the sole purpose of consulting, thus more breaking changes and magic DSL.

> it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves.

I work at Google (Cloud) but not on front end. All the front end SWEs I've talked to use Angular for their projects so we definitely do use it!

> The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves.

A lot of Google’s bigger products like gmail and maps predate Angular, though there are some products like the Google Cloud Platform Console that use it (https://console.cloud.google.com).

More interestingly that is simply a maturity issue. React told people the official API and people still used hidden features as it was easy and clever. Thankfully Facebook did the right thing, kept the API sacred and refactored all the hidden APIs breaking the world.

People got bloody noses and red faced and the React ecosystem is a better place for it.

> In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically)

Angular 2+ is "Angular"; Angular 1.x is "AngularJS"

As an aside the “it’s just Angular” thing doesn’t work for me when I Google for things...results come up with a mix of AngularJS and Angular2+ results. Searching for “angular2” rather than “angular” seems to work a lot better.

That's true. Paired with "go", can we dwell on the irony that Google has come up with the worst names for programming projects when it comes to searching for them?

Google uses Angular 2 extensively, just a lot of it is internal apps. From what I heard, there was a big push to typescript and angular 1.6 before switching to Angular. But Google fully uses Angular internally.

Lots of large companies are using Angular in production. From my experience, lots of smaller startups and a couple big companies are using react, but lots of enterprise apps and many former anuglar 1.x apps are now Angular 2+. It's fully production battle tested, even though we don't see it as much here.

Angular 2 is no more or less battle tested than React.

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