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Comment by gadr90 | Hacker News Reader

YES! Thank you! I think I'll die if I have to read another developer arrogantly defining what should and should not be, and how he, in all his glory, hereafter defines this framework to "NOT BE WORTHY".

I can't stand how some articles simply s&*t on years of software architecture principles and the work of very talented engineers and simply dismisses them like it's nothing.

If you disagree with a framework's perspective, AT LEAST be respectful.

BTW, I also have used Angular for 2 years and, given the pros and cons and existing alternatives, I will choose it again for my next big project. The structure is simply too solid. This is invaluable when you have a large team that must work together.

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I am always conflicted about writing about Angular on a negative light because the team has put some great work into it while raising the bar in how rich apps could be built on the web. Being a back-end developer for a long time, it let me build some great interfaces on the front-end really quickly, and I'm very thankful for that.

But we should also learn from where Angular succeeded and where it failed. Making XML declarative is fraught with difficulties. Things like ng-repeat are but a thin declarative veneer over the fundamentally imperative nature of constructing views. The biggest difference between most existing templating frameworks and React is in this world view: is the view constructed imperatively, or is it declared?

The other question of contention is how much implicit magic should the framework supply vs how much explicitness the user should bring into the code. Angular's design decision is to make bindings work magically, while React identifies explicitness as a virtue.

Having used both, I'm liking the imperative+explict camp.

Finally, a respectful and well founded analysis. Thank you for improving the quality of the debate.

My 2 cents: I actually prefer the declarative approach. My attempts at imperative view generation resulted in far more shooting-on-the-foot. Naturally, this is the very specific conclusions of me and my team, not the entire human race. I always think you should try both!

Also, I'm a huge fan of Polymer, which is also very much declarative. Going to use Angular instead of Polymer simply because of better project structure and browser support.

The Angular 2 presentation given recently at ng-europe made it clear that many of the fundamental parts of 1.x are not built on solid architectural principles, which is why they are killing most of them off.

I'd be interested to know how many of your large team were not experienced web developers before starting with Angular given that is one of the big criticisms in the article.

My team has mixed people but most of them are reasonably experienced. What we find most useful about Angular is that it offers a "right way" to go about things, which removes the necessity for endless discussions about "which architecture is best". When you have a large amount of apps that need to be built and maintained concurrently, having a similiar structure across all projects is very helpful.

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