Rob Eisenberg leaving Angular 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

Rob Eisenberg leaving Angular 2.0

eisenbergeffect.bluespire.com

72 pointsviggity10 comments

>> "Several months ago the general direction of Angular 2.0 began to change in critical ways. I found myself fundamentally at odds with certain aspects of the proposed design. Still, I tried to keep an open mind and explore the various possibilities. Unfortunately, I haven't been satisfied with how things have progressed since then. At this point, there are too many irreconcilable differences. The Angular that's being built is not the Angular I signed up to work on and after careful consideration I do not believe it’s best for the Durandal community."

Ouch.

Angular 2.0 is really looking the ugly beast, isn't it? I mean, killing off core 1.x concepts like $scope, controllers, DDO, jqLite, while introducing a new programming language to suit the framework -- even if optional -- is it too much?

I feel Angular 2.0 isn't really Angular. It's a new framework that shares the name only for branding purposes.

And now seeing the respected Rob Eisenberg leave the team based on irreconcilable design differences really undermines my faith in Angular 2.0.

>>I am not saying that Angular 2.0 is going to be a bad framework. What I am saying is that it is no longer fundamentally the same thing I was originally hired to help build nor is it compatible with my vision for the future.

From what I understand, Angular 2.0 is radically different from 1.x because the team believes the future direction of javascript development will overwhelmingly be "web components" (like Polymer). Therefore, they redesigned the API with that in mind and previous concepts such as $scope,etc can be obsoleted.

Unfortunately, Eisenberg's post was vague and it would have been helpful if he inserted a few examples of concrete code snippets to illustrate what he fundamentally disagrees with. If he can explain concrete decisions around syntax, semantics, etc, that would be educational for everyone.

I searched around and found that he previously[1] mentioned a future roadmap with web components in "Durandal 3.0" so I can't tell if he currently disagrees with web components as a concept or as a timeframe of implementation.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/durandaljs/sO3ghjtfrEo/a4S7B...

>> "I can't tell if he currently disagrees with web components as a concept"

From the updated DurandalJS site[0], Durandal vNext will "work well with Web Components."

[0]: http://durandaljs.com

He did appear on the Polymer dev mailing list last week to pick a bit of a fight about how web components are/are-not compatible with other frameworks: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/Ev7sO_BB...

I was just at Øredev in Sweden a couple weeks ago. Rob spoke about Angular 2.0, and the disagreements about direction were pretty evident in his talk [1]. The video is online now.

[1] http://oredev.org/2014/sessions/angularjs-2-0

I've used Angular and Durandal and I've found Durandal to be much easier to work with. Recently I've thought about which framework I would choose for a future project and it wasn't easy to pick between these two given Durandal's uncertain future as part of Angular, and Angular's apparent scorched earth version changes.

This news makes me very happy.

Interesting. One of the commenters on the parent article has come to the opposite conclusion after starting with Durandal and switching to Angular:

"I've invested a lot in Durandal: my own startup, as well as the new tooling for RavenDB. I was planning on migrating all these projects to Angular 2.0. And after your leaving Durandal and thinking it would go stale, I started building new projects in Angular 1.x.

"Now that I've used both Durandal and Angular, it's clear to me Angular 1.x is a better framework: the NG binding system is better than KO's, I don't have to worry about observables anymore, the dependency injection, to name a few."

That was me. Yes, Angular 1.x is clearly superior to Durandal 2.x.

That said, I'm happy with the news that Durandal will see a vNext. I believe Rob will make it into what Angular 2.0 should have been.

That's a tough spot to be in, sounds like a series of difficult decisions. I wish him the best of luck, watching the Durandal NextGen video now. (Which apparently pre-dates all this.)

God, this things are so "public", I could never imagine myself publicly leaving a dev team... But maybe I haven't been working long enough.

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