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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

In my experience people that hate Angular don't understand why they hate Angular.

Like, if you like Svelte, that's great. You will probably like Angular too.

The entire library is so spread out, with so many half-assed features.

When I wrote Angular I spent 2 weeks on getting something similar to `props.children` working. <ng-content> didn't work if the elements were dynamic. Outlet system was way too verbose.

The 2 way databinding is anachronistic and belongs in 2010.

The i18n system they shipped with is awful. No way to have translations in code, only in template. This breaks down very fast when building generic components.

The DI relies on https://www.npmjs.com/package/reflect-metadata, which makes the builder an opaque black box unlike a webpack configuration.

Because of the opaque CLI I've spent 2 weeks figuring out why every third dev build resulted in a 150 line long tsc stacktrace, and it turned out to be angular's 1.x types package. Would have been so much easier with a webpack configuration.

The props.children/slots issue is one of my biggest problems with angular. It’s really hard to use composition like you always do in react.

Another thing is, that angular components always wrap their template into a block element (like a div) in the DOM. So if you do some refactoring and split up one big component, the result in the DOM is different and your CSS may not work anymore. If you are using flexbox or grid, it may even be impossible to split the component.

> <ng-content> didn't work if the elements were dynamic

Usually if you run into problems like that, you should use templates.

Honestly, I'm not sure why `<ng-content>` exists vs templates. I'm sure there's a reason (verbosity?), but templates have way fewer caveats.

> Would have been so much easier with a webpack configuration

I agree. It's not hard at all to do a Webpack configuration of Angular. Just add the Angular plugin. (That's what the CLI does under the hood.) I wish they document it though.

The angular plugin for webpack is still an opaque black box.

Their own website renders the Angular "template" as a string with no syntax highlighting.

The framework is extremely overengineered requiring multiple files for "hello world"

It introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity for projects of any size

It uses invalid HTML, with attribute syntax including brackets and parentheses

Sadly It's just not a good framework

I wrote this on Quora 8 years ago, and it's still true:

https://qr.ae/pypHJw

It's my answer to what I can tell you agree is the most important question in software engineering - "What programming language has the shortest 'Hello World' program?"

We're talking about a framework here, not a programming language. I don't think the above poster's assessment about the amount of files needed for hello world offers a charitable conclusion either, given frameworks are not languages. The same file usage would apply to many other popular 'heavy' opinionated frameworks.

My point is, nobody writes Hello World webapps for a living. The number of lines or files is irrelevant. There is precisely zero value in this metric.

Sorry, I misread your comment.

There’s a grain of truth in that thought. First impressions matter, frameworks aren’t exempt from that basic psychological fact. If you treat ’complexity of hello world’ as a proxy for learning curve steepness (again, people do things like that subconsciously), you may end with a very wrong assessment very early. It’ll probably tell more about the assessor than the framework but it’s a real risk.

Indeed - if my goal is a minimal Hello, World, I don't even need javascript, I can put "Hello World" in a text file and name it index.html.

Problem is, this doesn't lead me to solve any harder problems.

>Their own website renders the Angular "template" as a string with no syntax highlighting.

That's not even a criticism of the framework.

> The framework is extremely overengineered requiring multiple files for "hello world"

Is that a valid criticism?

Angular is for writing medium to heavy complexity applications. Sure, if you want to write hello world programs in it, then it is going to be complex.

This is a generic comment thrown about for all large frameworks.

> It introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity for projects of any size

This I agree.

> It uses invalid HTML, with attribute syntax including brackets and parentheses

True, but so does React and other frameworks. To me, it seems like this is a limitation of HTML rather than a transgression of Angular.

> Sadly It's just not a good framework

It is a good choice for a large organization, with team members changing and all sorts of other goodness.

Sadly, those statements are objectively false.

> requiring multiple files for "hello world"

False (unless you're counting angular.json conf file for Angular CLI??)

> It uses invalid HTML, with attribute syntax including brackets and parentheses

And what, JSX is valid HTML????

FWIW Angular templates is completely valid HTML. (The only non-standard thing is that the attributes are case-sensitive.)

JSX can be syntax highlighted and linted easier. What if a variable that is being referenced is missing at that time in the component's lifecycle?

JSX makes so much more sense, making code the parent of the template, instead of keeping code and template as siblings.

This has been a debate since long before React or Angular existed. Keeping code and templates together typically makes sense to programmers while keeping the template as html in a separate file means you can edit it in any html editor, no special tools needed. I've always been partial to keeping them together, but working with designers who prefer it the other way, I can at least respect where they are coming from.

I mildly agree.

I note that Vue and Svelte have the same issue, and yet I rarely hear this criticism of them.

Lots of web developers love complexity, it makes the work you do seem more important.

> It uses invalid HTML, with attribute syntax including brackets and parentheses

Brackets and parens are valid in attribute names.

Section 13.1.2.3 of the HTML standard[0] states:

> Attribute names must consist of one or more characters other than controls, U+0020 SPACE, U+0022 ("), U+0027 ('), U+003E (>), U+002F (/), U+003D (=), and noncharacters.

[0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#attributes-2

> In my experience people that hate Angular don't understand why they hate Angular.

One of my major annoyances is the templating language. Completely unnecessary and over complicated, compared to JSX. Just another weird syntax to learn with its own arbitrary limitations and quirks.

I think it’s a good indicator of the overengineering surrounding Angular overall.

And you say the same of Vue and Svelte, I assume?

I haven't had the chance to work with either much, but at the end of the day, a new new syntax just for doing fancy if/else/for seems unnecessary. I believe Angular's hand was forced since JS at the time didn't have as ergonomic syntax as it does now, with fat arrow functions, .map and other niceties.

I see it as the opposite. JSX is a convoluted mess, and does not make for easy reading due to being mixed in with everything else, while Angular promotes clean separation and promotes a template language like many others. It's usually React codebases that I've seen overengineered due to lack of features, while Angular codebases are very same-y - that's a good thing from maintenance perspective.

Obviously there's some matter of taste, but JSX is simpler in my mind, because it's just JS with a tiny bit of syntactic sugar to have nicer function calls for components. That's it. Anything you can write in JS, you can write in JSX and it works. You can debug and use all the tools you'd use for regular JS.

With Angular templates, there's an entire new language, with its own weird syntax ngIf/else, ngSwitchDefault, let-*, pipes and other components that get pulled in based on whether you forgot to set up correctly or not in modules far-far away somewhere in the codebase, brackets of different sorts having different functions and just a lot more stuff to remember. And if it doesn't work, you're gonna get a silent error most of the time with no easy way to set a breakpoint to investigate.

I also don't believe there's any real separation between the HTML templates and the Component class, just because they're written in separate files. They're just as tightly coupled as any regular React component, just harder to follow. I don't think I've ever seen an Angular component, where you could swap out the template, without making simultaneous changes to the Component to accommodate it, which should be possible if they were truly separate.

I personally find JSX terrible with its very-very strange arbitrary quirks.

Having mutability/2-way-databinding makes angular hardly benefit from using TypeScript. State is just so much pain and it is hard to make impossible states not representable in the types.

Angular requires a lot of extra steps to get the templates properly type-checked (and you even need an editor plugin for that). I can't even name which non-standard entries in the tsconfig are necessary to have all templates checked entirely.

Most people use the cli to generate new components. Where in other frameworks, you just create a new file, maybe use a snippet and call it a day, the cli yields a test, scss, html and the actual component code as separate files.

Having worked with angular and react for 5 years in parallel, I'm pretty certain that I'd never touch angular again. The DX is so complicated in comparison. Despite forcing you to use TypeScript, angular is the framework that benefits the least of it.

I like Angular, but approach of doing the same thing in 3 different ways (promises, rx and now signals) make codebase more complicated and adds additional brain load.

Compared to React with Contexts, hooks, redux, reducers, Relay, Recoil….

A 3MB JavaScript runtime blob right out of the gate? ("Only" 275KB needed just to first render, like that's laudable on its own.)

Other frameworks have already loaded dependent REST/GraphQL data before Angular has even initialized.

Take someone on a mobile device and put them at the edge of cell signal range either because they're out an about or stuck in the bowels of a building with thick walls. Suddenly 275KB-3MB matters a lot more and the user is staring at a blank screen for 10+ secs.

Then there's the boilerplate, all the metadata you need to add to each component that has nothing to do with your problem domain.

And then there's runtime speed compared to alternatives.

While I'm truly happy to see Angular incorporate signals, now devs need to learn when to use signals rather than rxjs. I know now that it's the difference between needing async or not, but if you go down one path, it's a PITA to tear it down and rewrite for the new path.

THAT's why I don't like Angular, though I'd happily choose Angular over React and Vue, both of which are a prone to reducing codebases to big balls of mud due to their "flexibility".

How about the extra 30 seconds to couple minutes for CI/CD to make a production build for static deployment? V16 added the ability to put esbuild/Vite into the mix, but it still builds WAAAAAAAAY too slow compared to modern alternatives, especially if you're on v15-.

ng serve for development is a pig too. Save-reload cycle is far from instant.

I can just note that our Angular code seems to be much harder to maintain than our React code.

The React ecosystem also improves faster (yes, sometimes a bit too fast).

> I can just note that our Angular code seems to be much harder to maintain than our React code.

A big part of maintainability comes from the quality of code and/or existing experience with the two frameworks, not the frameworks itself.

I work at an Angular only shop, if we would write some React it would be probably harder to maintain for us than the Angular ones.

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