Angular v14 is now available

In the UK, there is no shortage of work for Angular contractors.

Enterprise and Government are particularly keen on it.

Yes, as Java/.NET shop, Angular is usually our first option for SPA applications, Vue second and then React third.

This when we just don't just use SSR + vanilaJS/WebAPIs.

I used Angular at my last company. After having used react for many years and then experimenting with svelte, Angular (even the most modern versions) felt like it was always in my way.

Bi-directional data binding and the isolation between style, structure, and logic felt was less productive. Angular has some nice properties, like dependency injection built in, but you can circumvent many of those needs with a functional component tree in react (or limit the surface area across components). The simple fact that you need @Output event emitters to handle callbacks is a good example of how bloated it feels.

It may be that I don't know nearly enough about Angular but even after a year of doing my best to learn the idiomatic Angular ways I wasn't impressed.

Yeah, a bunch of companies use it. It is still the 2nd most popular frontend framework.

Off hand I know it's used heavily at: Google (duh), Microsoft, VMWare, Capitol One and Fidelity.

I used it at Microsoft though there is also a ton of React there. I worked on PowerBI which is/was entirely Angular. The rest I just know from going to NgConf and seeing those other companies recruiting there.

Angular is very widely used in the enterprise, and I can confidently say that given we make most of our money at Ionic working directly with these enterprise teams. I think Angular has just found where it excels and that tends to be in larger companies.

The company I work on has a couple of projects built with Angular, however we are shifting to use React.

The reason being: no one around the company likes maintaining those projects because they hate the framework and we haven't been able to hire people willing to learn/work with Angular.

I love the framework as it has almost everything you need out of the box. At the beginning I hated it but as any tool/language once you get the architecture, patterns and ways to build stuff you feel it's a great tool.

I've used it on a lot of client projects, my current one included. Angular's batteries-included approach makes it way faster to spin up a new app for a new project, and avoids the problem of picking the wrong dependency for (state/navigation/styling/etc.) that plagues React projects.

You're confusing your own experience for the reality of the market. My last three employers use Angular. My current employer just replaced an AngularJS app with a new Angular 11 app for a Fortune 100 client.

Go to a job listing site and you'll find just as many positions hiring for an Angular dev (often paired with C#/ASP) as you will React.

Angular is popular at places the HN crowd tends to not work at (banks, consulting, fortune whatevers). Not sure why that is.

You might be thinking of AngularJS 1.x, the older framework whose API looks pretty archaic nowadays.

It was succeeded by Angular (versions 2 and up), which is very popular for large complex apps at large companies. I think React, in the form of Next and other frameworks built around React, have finally caught up with the reason that made it so: more stuff "in the box", with decisions already made and already working.

If you have 200 Angular projects, there's a good chance developers can move between them without much difficulty. If you have 200 React projects, they might have 15 different combinations of selections for various accompanying libraries. This makes moving developers around harder (matters a lot in large organizations).

For example, nearly every Angular project uses Angular's CSS isolation mechanism plus Sass for complexities on other axes. Whereas there are various popular CSS solutions that divvy the React user community among them.

There are trade-offs, of course; Angular has so much in the box that so far nothing like Next (convention-based routing etc.) has sprung up around it. So I am quite bullish on React and Angular both - there will be lots of large important projects churning along with these in another decade, and beyond.

Also important to remember that these are just the two most popular; there are a couple of hundred other competing SPA frameworks that work very well for their intended use cases.

The team I'm in uses Angular and used Angular.js before. The reasons are mostly historical, due to key developer's background. We never had any trouble finding people willing to work with it or who had prior experience. I have a hard time remembering a single instance of when the framework choice was a source of any issue, we'd be just as fine with Vue or React. Sure, Angular has a fair share of annoyances (who doesn't?), but these do get addressed, which is why the v14 feels like a step in the right direction - typed forms, less boilerplate, preliminary work for faster builds. In addition to these, my only gripes are with the router (ui-router was the best), not as big of a community compared to other frameworks and outdated testing tools that come out of the box. For SPAs, it does the job just fine.

Angular is very structurally regimented that makes it great for large complex applications used by large corporations, both for parallel work and maintenance.

My last three jobs involved Angular. The second-to-last one was a very heavy application in the US healthcare space. Angular was perfect for that app. In conjunction with Rxjs / ngrx it was extremely powerful. I agree the learning curve was… steep. I don’t regret a minute of it. I moved to another company and I’m doing react now. I was actually hired to support the cash cow written in Angular, but now the company moved focus to full react and we are not hiring Angular devs anymore. React is fun though. I really enjoyed doing a deep dive with Hooks, but I would still work with Rxjs if I could

I believe the AWS console uses, or used?, angular, as one can see the ng-* attributes on their elements but I wasn't able to readily find a specific file to confirm or deny that's still the case

I work on a team that maintains a customer-facing web application that is built on Angular. It's been in production for the past six years.

I think Angular not quite in "the graveyeard", but probably only because a lot of large organizations outside of Google have large code bases that are built on it. (Having said that, I forget who they are — VMWare and CapitalOne and such, maybe?)

Still, it is definitely not a hot technology any more (if it ever was... I think the botched "upgrade" from the old "AngularJS" to the (completely different, almost a repudiation of a lot of the core ideas of the original) "Angular" framework shed a lot of users, so maybe Angular was never actually "hot" to begin with).

I definitely wouldn't start any new project using Angular, except in one specific circumstance: you have a large (relative to the size of your development team) body of existing software that uses Angular.

Then, you might want to share components and libraries across apps, and also leverage the skills of your existing Angular-using team.

I do find it somewhat harder to hire for roles specific to Angular development (I think because not many people want to learn it), and I also note that deep Angular knowledge isn't likely to be that helpful when looking for a new job, either. It counts for something, sure, but experience with React is far more sought after, and even Vue or Svelte is likely to be a little more useful.

Angular isn't horribly less capable than those frameworks — it does a lot for you, makes things like accessibility easy^W possible, is TypeScript-based which is overall a big win IMO — but there is, and has been, just too much fuckery around the edges.

I don't think Angular is really keeping up; I'd say it has been slowly falling even further behind the general state of the art.

The rollout of Ivy (its new, more performant rendering engine) was a multi-year boondoggle. It was late, it was painful to migrate to, third-party libraries still haven't really migrated so you still have problems/annoyances using those, and it sucked all their resources away from other important aspects like the Angular Language Service — so we didn't have good completion and linting in editors like VS Code, for quite a long time.

There was also nobody left to fix the testing story. They finally killed off Protractor, their bespoke E2E test monstrosity, after years of letting it languish, but the testing situation with Angular is still really mediocre and sub-par. Modern E2E frameworks like Playwright or Cypress support "component testing" (test components without rendering your whole app) for React and other frameworks out of the box, but not Angular.

AFAICT that is because Angular has this weird "NgModule" system where you construct these Angular-specific module things, and then they can import other Angular-specific module things... so rendering a component is not at all simple. The Angular team seems to be trying to make this optional, and Angular co-founder Igor Minar tweeted some "NgModule becoming optional soon, I think!" kind of teaser... before he left the Angular team and Google. That was several months ago at least; I also think he was the last founder to leave, so there are none left if I am not mistaken.

The i18n story recently finally upgraded to 'meh', after several years of being 'ugh'.

The DX is objectively bad — builds are very slow. There was some talk of taking the type checking out of band, so that it would still happen, but not block the edit-and-re-render iteration loop — but that hasn't happened. So in a non-trivial project that loop (which is typically the main loop) is slow.

Angular does do a lot for you, but in order to do so it monkey-patches DOM to hell and back — every async operation is monkey-patched so that it can do automagic change detection. That works great except when it doesn't work or when it makes things super slow, and it also makes debugging kind of nightmarish IMO — you end up in this 100s-of-frames-deep call stacks going through the zone.js async operation interception library. They are trying to make zone.js optional, too — or maybe it's technically optional now, but not really as a matter of practice.

TL;DR — Angular works okay, but after working with it in production for the last several years, I'd say is pretty mediocre; C- would not use again

You're in a bubble. It's used tonnes

Yeah, that has always weirded me out, too, but I have assumed that because Angular is one of TypeScript's largest and most significant customers, that the flag is highly unlikely to actually be removed.

(?) I'm just guessing though.

Angular comes with the advantage of you can learn “the angular way” and it will always be applicable. With React every time you pick up a new project you don’t know what you’re going to get.

I also have some serious doubts about the long term viability of React for what it’s worth. They made some choices early on in the project about how they decided to integrate with the wider web platform that made a lot of sense at the time but are now big liabilities that they can’t get rid of.

Like I wouldn’t consider starting a new project with React in 2022 if I wanted it to still be around for more than 5 years.

My opinion is that Angular is the worst of all the current frontend stacks. It's acceptably bad to a lot of people because "no one ever went wrong using something from Google", but it's just bad, especially for something associated with Google. It's "a horse designed by a committee of people with huge egos" that doesn't do anything it sets out to do well and has a ton of "best practices" and "defaults" that lead directly to "pits of failure" rather than anything resembling success. I've blogged more detailed technical analysis about that if you are interested.

React tries not to be awful and generally seems to have a good idea of the direction it is going. It's not perfect, no tech stack is ever perfect, but as an "expert" at this point on both stacks, I'd wholeheartedly recommend React over Angular.