Comment by ben336 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben336 | Hacker News Reader

So there seem to be 2 separate issues this post is addressing.

1. A lot of JavaScript frameworks are being released 2. JavaScript frameworks are being updated too fast.

His biggest example, the Angular 2.0 split, is of the second one, but he seems primarily concerned with the first one.

I can see the first one being a problem primarily for developers keeping their skills up to date. The fact is that once you've put a decent amount of code down into an application, you're not going to be constantly switching frameworks. Maybe do it once, but otherwise the applications that are already built will stay on a stable foundation. So for developers working on a single or stable set of applications (not client work), this shouldn't effect their actual work. There may be an issue of skill decay if employers are constantly looking for the latest and greatest, but outside the Silicon valley bubble, I still see a lot more jQuery and Backbone job postings than Ember or React.

As for the issue of frameworks lacking stability, I frankly don't see that. Yes Angular is making big breaking changes. But otherwise? Let's look at the other 6 biggest front end libraries/frameworks.

jQuery has been fairly stable for a few years now, with minimal breaking changes.

Underscore has been very stable, albeit growing with competition/help from Lo-Dash

Knockout and Backbone have evolved slowly while remaining small and very small respectively.

Ember has a very clear process for moving their framework while allowing actively developed applications to stay up to date in a reasonable way.

React is still pre 1.0 and that's something you should know going in.

Basically if you started a project with any of those technologies (or angular for that matter) at some point in the past 3 years, you've probably had a pretty easy time in adjusting as the library specific concepts have changed.

I just don't see the idea of "Frameworks are evolving too quickly" as being particularly compelling. There's a lot of information out there. Yes if you want to know it all and always be using the newest shiny thing, it will probably be too much. But none of this is preventing anyone from actually building useful things today.

I'd say the Angular 2.0 split actually fits your first point (A lot of JavaScript frameworks are being released) rather than your second as essentially, it is a new library that shares only the name. The way I see it, Google is deprecating Angular 1.0 and creating a new library which will also be called Angular (2.0) but might as well be called something else. This bungling is rather typical of Google open source projects and I agree with the author on being aware of corporate sponsorship. I'd add to that, especially of Google, whose track record in this space (front end) is abysmal and whose track record in general as far as developer technologies is mediocre at best.

It shares more than just the name. The Angular rewrite was unavoidable if they had any hope of integrating seamlessly with web components. They also remove a lot of the concepts that people lambasted Angular 1.0 for and end up with a much more elegant framework. It seems they were damned whether or not they wrote Angular 2.0 - people would either bitch about the current framework for being convoluted in places or bitch about the new one for having breaking changes.

I don't see anything else that it meaningfully shares with Angular 1, certainly nothing that warrants keeping the name the same. What people are bitching about now is that Angular is essentially deprecated and a dead project: in other words, Google's spectacular failure at maintaining the project. That applies to both Angular 1 and 2 now, as it's clear to me and plenty of other devs that Google is simply not serious in this space (not to mention that Angular 1 wasn't all that great to begin with when used for anything but simple apps). I think it'd be foolish to choose Angular 1 or 2 at this point, knowing that there will be literally no support from the creators. Other frameworks do this as well, just not on such a short timescale.

> What people are bitching about now is that Angular is essentially deprecated and a dead project: in other words, Google's spectacular failure at maintaining the project

You keep using the term "Google" as though it represents a single, unified entity aligned on all fronts. Angular was never an official initiative within Google and its usage within Google is actually pretty limited. It's a Google framework in name only. It grew organically out of one small team's (who happened to work at Google) desire to simplify the rewrite of a very large legacy web app (DoubleClick). It's no more "Google Angular" than Bootstrap is "Twitter Bootstrap", which was another project that started within large, recognizable company but wasn't officially initiated or mandated by said company. I'm sure Google employees are sick of people lumping them into one big group and making blanket statements such as the ones you made in your comment.

> I don't see anything else that it meaningfully shares with Angular 1

Then you haven't been paying attention. Angular 2.0 still has dependency injection, directives, two-way binding, scopes, routing, and more. Directives are being renamed to match more common terminology and scopes are now just implied but these are improvements, not removals.

> I think it'd be foolish to choose Angular 1 or 2 at this point, knowing that there will be literally no support from the creators.

This is just FUD. The creators have said they will continue supporting Angular 1.0 well after Angular 2.0 is released; they even hired a few people recently to do just that. And there are core contributors out there who don't work for Google who will likely keep supporting Angular 1.0 for as long as it makes sense to. It's open source, after all. And to say that Angular 2.0 will receive "literally no support from the creators" is simply trolling.

Whether or not the creators are mainly Google based or not, it doesn't change the fact that their support is unreliable and untrustworthy. It's not trolling for me to express my opinion as such. If they're so quick to abandon Angular 1 (about 2 years since the stable release), they're likely to do it again. This isn't a technology issue, it's a trust issue. All this so they can create a more "elegant framework" that's likely to be more of the same. Also, just because the 2.0 release uses general concepts and design patterns that 1.0 also happens to use (DI, routing, two-way binding, etc.) doesn't make it an upgrade. That's akin to saying they're both Javascript, so they must have something in common. Ridiculous.

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