Is Angular the JS frameworks for hobbyists? | Hacker News Reader

Is Angular the JS frameworks for hobbyists?

11 pointsrachbelaid4 comments

I have been playing and trying to built stuff with Backbone and ember few times.

JS is the language of web and it needs to be known but alas (or luckily) I'm not a daily JS developer and code most of the times in python so I'm far from mastering it.

My main issue was that I was hitting the learning curve every times I was coming back to my backbone or Ember code. Why? probably the lack of experience in JS, the amount of boilerplate code, the lack of structure/guidance (too agnostic for an hobbyist)

Recently I gave a go to Angular, it feels good! Clear codebase, very explicit and so very easy to come back into it after few days.

I'm not starting the debate which is better or not. But I thought that it was maybe just a very well suited framework for people like me who develop backend most of the time WHO ARE JS HOBBYISTS ...

Any feedbacks ?

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Yes, but it's also suitable for "real" applications.

I write a lot of hobby/side projects just for experimenting and learning, and Angular has become my framework of choice. You can just get stuff done so quickly and easily, particularly after you've been using it for a while.

Angular has a sort of jagged learning curve. It's shallow for quite a while, and you can do a lot of work in that shallow half. However once you need to start writing your own directives, the curve steepens. It's not the steepest curve, but there's definitely a transition. This is when you hear people talking about Angular being difficult, citing things like transclusion.

I've made it to the other side of the curve, and I love writing directives and services, it's become fairly intuitive to me. With the modular architecture, if you there is a large library of available modules/plugins, even people who don't want to write a lot of JS and understand Angular to it's core can do some amazing things. That's why I built http://ngmodules.org , so that people can share modules, and AngularJS can be accessible to more people.

No doubt that you can built real application with it, why I choose it.

My point was more that it's reachable framework and once you got the logic, it starts to make sense. About the learning, I started some little wall when I have to write first directive or didn't the route event was not fired when you don't have a view element.

I realized that learning angular is going to be a long road but it seems to be at least enjoyable.

Btw, I meant hobbyist not in the bad way but more highlight the opportunity to build modern web app for people like me who are not hardcore JS developer.

Thanks for the link

Do you have more examples of what you have built with Angular?

Sure. Also check out Meteor (which will blow your mind, but is very opinionated about what else you can use alongside it) and Derby.

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