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Comment by momento | Hacker News Reader

Angular has a lot of unique concepts that people find difficult to wrap their heads around. The Observable pattern, decorators, typescript, etc. When you throw things like NGRX and effective management of state / side-effects in the mix; things get exponentially more complex and difficult to scale.

I have personally witnessed companies take guys who have been slapping together "apps" in jQuery / .NET for the past 10 years and tell them "it's time to make the stack modern" and "we're going with Angular because we're a Microsoft house".

Things go very bad very quickly.

If you don't take the time to understand the Architecture behind scalable modern web applications you're going to have a bad time.

Anyone can slap together a quick and dirty app with Angular or React - not everyone can scale one correctly with thought given to the architecture behind these applications.

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Agreed. "Unscalable" code is completely possible to write in Angular or React. Simply put, it's bad code that doesn't follow the paradigms of the framework it lives in, with all of the usual suspects (spaghetti code) sprinkled in.

I haven't done much with Angular 2+ (I use Vue now), but in my Angular 1 days, I've definitely seen a lot of Angular apps that were basically put together like a jQuery app. Massive controllers, lots of dom manipulation and logic in the controllers. My approach at the time was that controllers should be as small and simple as possible, with most business logic, data models, communication, etc extracted to services. The controller should just connect the various parts, nothing more. But when you're used to unstructured jQuery, the controller is an obvious place to just put everything.

> "we're going with Angular because we're a Microsoft house"

Is ms invested in Angular?

It's a Google project, isn't it? Is it first-party in dot.net? I though that was Blazor?

The architecture concepts behind Angular are very .net-esque in a lot of ways. It's often an easier transition for folks used to MVC style projects with a heavy reliance on dependency injection to wrap their head around Angular than some other SPA options out there so the two get related in this way a lot.

Microsoft also supported Angular early on as it was one of the largest early adopters driving folks to Typescript.

Angular is the framework of choice for most Java/.NET shops, because it is basically JEE/Spring/WebForms/MVC, but in JavaScript, besides being written in TypeScript which is quite appealing.

Before Angular, those developers would probably have chosen Knockout.js instead.

Would you recommend any resources to learn how to effectively build a scalable modern web app? I haven't worked with Angular for about a year now, but I didn't use NGRX or similar alternative and I distinctly remember that managing state for the app got progressively harder as the app got more complex.

yeah I think what people are getting at here is that there's often a large investment to figure out how to use Angular2+ correctly (and even a lot of the concepts from Angular2 have been improved upon with new features in versions 6-8). A lot of times it's not "bugs" but if you're not in a place where you can spend 8 hours a day learning the framework in addition to building your app, you're going to have to choose one or the other -- and that's where frustrations set in. I'm gonna choose "build my app" every time.

I don't think Angular is a bad choice across the board, but you need to weigh this heavily when deciding to use it.

> Observable pattern, decorators, typescript

Neither of those is Angular-specific. In fact, of those you mentioned jQuery is the library with the unusual, idiosyncratic concepts.

They are not Angular-specific, but they are required to know. That undeniably increases the learning curve. And the Observable pattern is decoupled from Angular change detection, so spaghetti coders can find themselves in especially confusing situations. I say this as someone who loves RxJS and typescript.

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