You have ruined JavaScript (2014) | Hacker News Reader

You have ruined JavaScript (2014)

codeofrob.com

9 pointsbloniac10 comments

I hate factory-factory-factories as much as the next person, but I think it's hard to say Angular "has ruined JavaScript" when it's a minority share of the industry

Though I guess maybe the trajectory looked a bit different in 2014

I think the accusation is fair. After all, Google did dump AngularJS entirely into the trash with the incompatible release of "Angular" (without the JS) when they realized what a monster they had made. Like the author says, all of the layers of services, factories, etc. just made it unnecessarily confusing without adding any utility.

Google also started the Polymer project which became Lit, which is the antithesis of Angular: all of its benefits with none of its cruft. If Angular ruined JS, Lit saves TS.

Reminds me of Joel Spolsky's Hammer Factory (original is sadly no longer available): https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories

What I really like about this article is that it highlights the fine line between a library or framework that can be configured to do pretty much anything, and just a programming language.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is just a plot made by some people so that most people will not get actual coding experience and just learn to turn knobs on the current framework, thus making the difference between them and the frameworks builders even bigger.

If that was their goal they failed miserably. In reality, AngularJS made extra boilerplate and extra spaghetti, leading to its eventual abandonment by Google. If anything, you had to really be an expert programmer to use Angular.

I'll put in a third plug for Lit here since it doesn't get much love on HN. Lit is as bare metal as web components and data binding properties could possibly be. It's near zero boilerplate. You just include Lit and start writing your real code. What a relief!

http://lit.dev

I don't think you need to plug Lit for a third time in a thread with 7 comments.

That's probably true. Forgive my enthusiasm. I have no dog in the fight.

is this the same article?

I've no exact copy of the original article in my head, but I think everything after "===" is a copy of it, yes.

This is great and funny AF, speaking as someone who did a lot of AngularJS. Thankfully, now we have Lit which is lovely and about as close to bare metal as you can get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com