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Comment by nateabele | Hacker News Reader

Wow. After using AngularJS for a few months, it's amazing what a nightmare it looks like to work with Backbone.

I'm going to have to try AngularJS. One of the things that put me off is how much it looks like ASP or JSP with the angular tags. Obviously it must be good as many people rave about it.

We're using Backbone for a large project and yes we have to track and dispose of everything manually but it's so small that we can make it do what we want. I will say this, Backbone has made our team better JavaScript developers because it didn't throw the kitchen sink at us. I just hope AngularJS is not Struts on the client side.

Right? Jquery DOM mess < Backbone < Angular.

Please write your DOM -> Angular or Backbone -> Angualar follow up for this article - would love to see the difference.

Like TodoMVC on steroids :)

Sorry, my time isn't worth so little that I'm going to spend hours writing an article just to prove a point to a guy on HN, but here's an existing example:

https://github.com/angular/peepcode-tunes/commit/87dfa695d99...

Diff stats: 360 additions, 636 deletions, on a total of 628 original lines of JavaScript (app + test code; deletions include redundant lines of template code).

Thanks for your link.

If your time's worth so much, why are you on HN spending time contradicting someone? Saving all your HN-time and writing an article to educate people would give greater value to your time and educate more of humanity...

Thinking that maybe the vague & snarky reply was both more enjoyable and quicker to write.

How is AngularJS compared to Knockout?

Haven't worked with Knockout extensively, but I know their change listeners have cascade issues, and I'll grant this is a preference thing, but compared to Angular, their binding syntax is ass.

Also, Angular is the only framework where the DOM itself is your template. This cannot be explained, only experienced. :-)

> Angular is the only framework where the DOM itself is your template.

Hey, the same applies to Knockout.

Yes, the declarative syntax is verbose, but the DOM is your template.

Angular is more of a framework than a library. You have to do everything the Angular way or things will become very difficult.

In trying to learn it, I found it quite complex (beyond the basic hello world examples).

It's kind of interesting that we've almost developed an expectation of JavaScript being simple. It's easy to forget what a pain it was to write cross-browser JS even 5 years ago. I like this progress.

Thanks for the info. I've used Knockout but not Angular yet. I've found Knockout to be excellent in not getting in my way and being easily fitted into my existing code. One thing I don't feel comfortable with Ember & Backbone is that they come as a whole framework and require me retrofitting my app to their framework.

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