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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

I kind of think this herd mentality in the tech industry is annoying. There are a lot of people using React, but that doens’t make Vue a bad choice. Conversely, just because Vue is new and relatively popular doesn’t make it the “new React.” Pitting them against each other like this is disingenuous, as engineers will make choices and use both — it’s not like picking React will kill Vue or vice versa. That doesn’t say anything about the likes of Ember and Angular that are still in use.

A good comparison is backend stacks. Rails exists, but so does Laravel and Django. If it were truly a big deal which was the biggest, then only one choice would remain. Instead, they all have healthy ecosystems with companies using all three.

It doesn’t have to be a war.

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I completely agree with you, but there is still the point of 3rd party support and workplace acceptance (this is somewhat similar to the stupid "gaming console war").

The more popular a library is, the more support its ecosystem gets, and the more likely you can convince your boss/company to use it. So if you prefer one, you may really want it to be "the most popular" to ensure you can keep using it.

Eg: people who really like Angular 2+ are kind of struggling right now. If you join a company and they're not already using Angular 2+, good freagin luck. Chances are they won't switch from React/Vue/whatever to it anytime soon.

Because of this, and the general perceived volatility of the JS ecosystem, its not too surprising people treat this as a "war". It's unfortunate.

Another example: Typescript vs. Flow. Two different type checkers, with different capabilities and pros/cons. But given that many devs are using VSCode now there is so much emphasis being placed on Typescript by MS that Flow is slowly becoming a second-class citizen.

Great example. Also means you can google anything about TypeScript like the most obscure bug, and SOMEONE has hit it before you. Flow, not so much.

Facebook really screwed up by not having Windows support for the longest time, and even after they did, not having it as a first class citizen (since most statistics have FE devs to be roughly 50% on Windows). Not that they cared about adoption, but as Flow users, we did.

At my company we started out with Flow and eventually agreed to switch to TypeScript, as the former is getting to be too obscure a technology.

If you join a company and they're not already using Angular 2+, good freagin luck.

You can say that about any library; it has nothing to do with the popularity, support or quality of the particular dependency. If the technical decision makers choose not to use something you like then you won't get to use it.

This is one of the key reasons to climb your career ladder. If you climb high enough you get to be that decision maker.

>You can say that about any library; it has nothing to do with the popularity, support or quality of the particular dependency. If the technical decision makers choose not to use something you like then you won't get to use it.

The "technical decision makers" though has very much to do with the "popularity, support or quality of the particular dependency".

If a dependency is popular then more technical decision makers at more companies will be using it, and the more choices one that likes/wants to work with it has for a job.

>This is one of the key reasons to climb your career ladder. If you climb high enough you get to be that decision maker.

Which will make the point moot, as they wont be the one coding using the technology anymore.

Example: a company is using Angular 1 today and looking to modernize their stack. You have been hired, and one of your first tasks is to pick a new framework and convince the rest of the team that it's the best choice. You're thinking about the following options:

1) React 2) Vue 3) Angular 2+ 4) Aurelia

If your preference is 1) or 2), it shouldn't be too difficult, even though it means a complete rewrite or building in-house adapters to migrate gradually. If it's 3), even though similar adapters exist, good luck convincing anyone. If it's 4, you're basically dreaming.

I agree that they're very different, but at the same time, there's a non-trivial base of users who earnestly believe that when you're picking a JS framework to use for <insert whatever>, momentum is a meaningful factor in it.

Obviously, it rarely makes sense to select a framework that is completely disused, or unsupported, but there are articles out there by reputable sources who assert that if you're not using the current hotness, you're going to miss out on every new tool that crops up in the ecosystem, and your startup will languish and die as a result of having to spend so many more cycles just to keep up with what other people can 'npm install'.

What's worse is that they're not entirely wrong. Any good plugin for Vue right now is going to show up in React or Angular post-haste, if it doesn't exist there already.

Edit: I also can't help but wonder how many people saw this article, clicked the link, realized it was based on stars, and then went and starred Vue (exactly as I did). Every time I refresh, Vue is closer to 'toppling' React (at least according to these nonsense metrics)

> What's worse is that they're not entirely wrong.

If your startup dies because of your choice in javascript framework, you were doomed from the get go.

I don’t think there’s a war. I think there’s a fanboy who was amused by this and took 5m to put a page together.

I still see both React and Angular as extremely compelling choices. This website merely turns Vue into another viable choice. However, I sent this link to a PM who I frequent for feedback on pet projects (smart colleague, lots of valuable dissent).

In a nutshell, I'm trying to turn <something> into a bare-bones HTML page. We currently use an XML document interpreter that was written in 2006; with performance woes and maintainability woes abound. Transpiling to JS neatly solves this.

I started off with my own Angular-like template language, for which this PM correctly scolded me: people will need to learn it. He indicated that I should just use Angular - but the problem is that Angular is opinionated and at odds with this legacy system that I'm trying to clean up. I struggled for at least a week and I dropped for good reasons. I had a discussion with him last Friday and suggested Vue (as it is far closer in execution model when compared to what I am trying to solve): "what's Vue? We shouldn't use niche frameworks, people will need to learn that." Now I have an answer to that :).

I wonder if it’s a nerd thing.

“Linux is better than Windows”

“Android is better than iOS”

“Python is better than PHP”

“Vim is better than everything else”

Once you get old enough, you realize everything is shit and nothing is better than anything else because, again, it's all shit.

Just because everything is shit (yes I'm grumpy too) doesn't mean it's the same level of shit: https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Fallacy-Of-Gray

Especially when you work in enterprise, and even more so when you work in public sector enterprise.

We’re using tech that’s outlived more fads than I can count, yet I’m still surprised when younger hires insists on using stuff that’s basically supported by one man.

I’ll admit JAVA almost made it to the list of techs we were going to have a conversation about in the late 00s, but these days it’s as relevant as ever. So is C#.

The front end is nothing but terrible though. I trained a few of my employees to do angular, and then they had to relearn things with angular2. Maybe that’s not an issue for start ups where youngsters slave away in their free time, but it cost me roughly $60.000 in expenses and missed work to retrain our people.

> I trained a few of my employees to do angular, and then they had to relearn things with angular2

Had to? Did you hit the limit of the things you could do with AngularJS?

Your developers probably decided to move to Angular2 because it was new and shiny, and when they'll be out for a new job it'll look good on the CV. I doubt there was any business reason for investing those $60k.

There are several business reasons to do update, I'll take you through a few if them.

* We operate a lot of IT systems, some of them are build in corporation with smaller local firms. This isn't necessarily the most sound decision financially, but it's a political decision to support the local area. We handle the business end, the project management, we do fairly strict code reviews and we take over once it's ready for operations. I said it wasn't the most sound decision financially, but so far it's actually been a cheap way to develop smaller user friendly functionality in a lot of areas. None of these small companies have AngularJS qualified people anymore, and haven't had for a while.

* I can't hire people to do AngularJS. It didn't stick around for long enough for any real talent to develop on it, at least not in Denmark. I'm not hiring from the most lucrative position either, mind you, it's the public sector after all.

* I don't want to operate two Angular versions in my stack. I already manage more than 500 different IT systems, it'd be crazy to manage more JavaScript frameworks than I have to.

* I spend a lot more than $60k upgrading my employees. A few of my developers wanted to go with Angular 2 rather than stick with AngularJS. I'm perfectly fine with that. They could've learned something else, but I generally let my employees chose their direction as long as it also makes sense on the business end. This upgrade was perfectly fine with me.

Unless Google does a completely new take on Angular2-6 in the coming years, it'll turn out to save me a lot more than the $60k in the long run.

It's fine, just none of the reasons you gave is an actual business reason. Basically you moved to Angular2 because everybody else around did, and it would have been harder to recruit and to keep developers, and to interact with developers of other companies.

They're perfectly valid reasons, but they have nothing to do with the quality of tool, or of the product, or with the cost sustained to develop it. Basically you had to move on just to stay exactly where you were.

You’re not really reading what I write, are you?

Am I missing a bit of sarcasm in the first line, maybe? Yes, you are right, those you list are all valid business reasons. They just don't have anything to do with the frameworks: if everyone had made the inverse move from Angular2 to AngularJS, you would have done the same for the exact same reasons. Do you agree?

I imagine 60k saved you the cost of having to train replacements for your developers that left for companies already using Angular 2.

Then let's say that Angular2 had the same business value of, for example, free meals, stock options, cool company parties and a sense of purpose. In other words, keeping the developers entertained. With the possibile difference that while the above things actually have a value in themselves, the new shiny framework only has one because people are afraid to be left behind.

It's just a matter of which shit tastes better to you. =)

You might enjoy Gary Bernhardt's talk "Wat"[1] and, well, pretty much all the other ones.

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

This seems like a very cynical comment to me, and I find it strange that no one has tried to rebut this yet. I always found it refreshing that Hacker News tried to resist this kind of thinking. Is that spirit fading?

Some software just sucks less.

Gersploosh is clearly the superior framework.

It's our version of sports teams. ("Cavs are better than 76ers!")

We pick a tribe and can be loud and obnoxious in support of them.

Vim is better than everything else.

- Albert Einstein

Emacs or death! - Évariste Galois

They are called "holy wars", the Jargon File has an entry

People are crazy. You give them options, and they want a war to extinguish them and create a winner. There must be a narrative and a winner to rule them all. Otherwise, how do you know what you’re doing is right, after all?

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