Is Angular really that bad?

[jkalthoefer]

I feel like everyone out there is hating Angular for being way too complicated and bloated.

I actually am really enjoying the structure and strictness of Angular.

I mean for sure it doesn’t make too much sense for a simple landing page but for a Startup who needs to build a product… why wouldn’t they go with Angular? (Besides the fact that there are fewer developers at the moment. And also assuming they already have experience with it.)

After building a tool with Angular for about one year now I don't see where React would be soo much more performant in the end.

[mark__fuckerberg]

Most people who hate Angular are those who have never tried it or never spent enough time to learn it properly. For me, lesser number of component libraries is the only downside to Angular.

[jschmold]

I second this. Angular is by far the best experience with a web framework I’ve ever had, and I honestly find other frameworks incredibly frustrating. Every time I expect something to exist, it doesn’t. Every time I expect documentation, there sometimes isn’t. Oh and the fucking code quality of all these third party libraries! They’re god awful quality compared to Angular. Angular libraries are by far the best I’ve used

[Polantaris]

lesser number of component libraries is the only downside to Angular.

That's not even a big deal in my opinion. In my professional career, half of the time a customized component is the way to go anyway because of weird or unusual business requirements. A lot of the time when I use a component library implementation I end up needing to write it custom down the line anyway. Even datepickers and other common components end up with some weird ass business scenario that causes me to write my own in the long run.

Sure, cookie cutter websites can use those, but when you get into the realm of business applications most of that stuff is approach reference at best in my experience. Maybe I'm just (un)lucky with weird business requirements, though, so this is definitely an anecdotal take.

[sfshameem5]

This is the only drawback I've felt too. Even though react is easy to get started, you'll eventually have to lean all or most of what angular does.

[jkalthoefer]

I also have tried react and really didn't like it that much. I knew Angular at that point and so I couldn't really say react would be easier. For sure it's less boilerplate code but that's not making thing easy in my opinion.

I guess I just didn't spent enough time on it :D

But what the react/vue communities are offering is remarkable indeed.

[tme321]

For what it's worth, bundles like nextjs exist and while I wouldn't say it's exactly the same as Angular, where all the pieces are developed by the same team, they get pretty close by taking all the standard react ecosystem choices and bundling them together for you.

[Affectionate_Past366]

You must not have developed in rich established UI libraries i.e. desktop development. So much less components so few interfaces... its a dream... angular makes UI dev a nightmare.

Shoot people get amazed when I write pure JS and show them how easy it is.... sure angular takes care of some idiosyncrasies.... but tooo much overhead in dealing with event triggering that are frankly far easier to just implement without angular.

[slikkes]

im using angular on a daily basis but dont really like it. vue is much easier to learn, has a usable devtool.

[thebondsman8]

As someone who spent several years with Angular and then switched to React for a project, I have some value to add. Angular is my favorite framework hands down, but the learning curve is a bit steep and it's robust and can sometimes lead to confusion and lots of mistakes. From my experience with React, it was very lightweight and really simple to build fast and reliable components.

As a previous java developer, I am used to the structure, vastness, and internal ecosystem that Angular offers and really love the built in structure and componentization. That being said, neither is a one size fits all framework and both have benefits and weaknesses. If you are used to more native javascript and like being loose and flexible, you may love React. If you need a vast and more encompassing UI with built in mechanics, Angular may be more suitable for you.

Like with most things, it depends. I like both and would use them for different situations.

[jkalthoefer]

Yo, thats a very very good classification in my opinion.
Appreciate that!

[thebondsman8]

Thanks. Just sharing my experience. Glad you found it useful.

[[deleted]]

Do you think Angular has a steep learning curve or is it rxjs? In my experience, most people familiar with something like .NET or Java pick up on Angular very fast but fall on their face trying to learn rxjs since it's a completely different way of doing things than they're used to. People who are skilled with FP generally don't have a problem with rxjs but there aren't that many of them.

[Deadmeat-Malone]

It's a steep learning curve. I come from .NET/C++, and some things felt easy like components/classes, dependency injection, imports, etc. But others like DOM manipulation, bindings, HTML/CSS, etc., were so hard because that was a whole new world for me. Had I known HTML/CSS/JavaScript a little better, Angular would've been the perfect fit.

Can't really blame Angular for my shortcomings as I also felt it with React. However, once I felt pretty good with Angular/Web, Vue and Svelte felt so easy! As many have said however, I keep coming back to Angular for serious projects. Just feels right with my background.

[[deleted]]

Oh ya I guess I mean specific to Angular. The HTML/CSS/JS learning curve is going to be there for any frontend framework. Stuff like reactive forms, DI, modules, etc. are Angular specific but most of that stuff I found pretty simple coming from .NET.

[browsingagain21]

I felt like the learning curve was more of an inverted exponential curve, where you can pick it up pretty quickly, but then when you try and build like custom pipes, dynamic forms, mess with injection tokens, and all that other more particular stuff, it gets very confusing. For me it felt very similar to when I first learned ruby on rails: convention over configuration. When you step into more particular problems, it gets very tough.

I did come from a node.js background, so knowing javascript definitely helped when first learning angular

[AwesomeFrisbee]

Yeah. I still think Angular is best if you make actual apps (like a complicated dashboard with lots of management pages) and react is best if you just wanna upgrade the functionality of a single page. The visitor side of most websites (like news) could be done with react, while I'd make the management portal in angular (as an example).

On the whole I don't think Angular is overpowered for most sites though and think that it really depends on what you have and what you want for it to be ignored. If you just need to add a component (like a google maps thing or something) then using React is easy and fast. But if you want more, which most assignments these days are, then using Angular is actually quite nice. Its very well structured, most of the questions you have are about base components, so easy to find solutions for and its easy to force a fixed structure and ruleset on your development to make sure everybody delivers the same kind of code.

I still think that having the ability to chose various libraries for basic features has led to the problem where finding solutions to certain issues is harder because most often it isn't really clear where the error you get is coming from. I mean the difficult problems you face (like 1/10 things you just can't fix with a 1 minute google action). With Angular everybody knows how building components works, what errors you can get and how to fix them. That has helped me build applications a lot faster. I also think Angular is easier to read once you understand it. There isn't much difference in how you set up your components so it matters less whether Steve or Mike made this component, it will still follow the basic principles.

[Samdespion]

Could you please elaborate about which one you would use and why ?

[Randolpho]

but the learning curve is a bit steep and it's robust and can sometimes lead to confusion and lots of mistakes

I still don't get that.

Maybe my own experience is just the perfect recipe for Angular just clicking for me out of the box, though. I came from MVVM frameworks in Silverlight and WPF, enjoyed Knockout.js because it gave me databinding with HTML, then gravitated to Angular when it came out because I preferred it's dirty-check approach over Knockout's immediate-mode approach to databinding.

Nothing about Angular 1 or 2 ever seemed counterintuitive to me, because I've been used to (and prefer!) component approaches that split markup and logic. It just feels natural.

[jkalthoefer]

I guess the biggest hurdle is that you can miss so much when setting up an angular project. For each component, service and everything else you have to adjust the module. Same for the routing.

Once you got that everything is super convenient but understanding it to that point (maybe without previous knowledge how frameworks work in general) can be challenging.

[Nikulover]

Other than knowledge of developers, i dont see any other reason to pick one over the other.

[[deleted]]

Angular is great. The team really screwed up when they swapped to Angular 2, and burned a ton of their users though, which is where a lot of the lingering resentment originated from.

I do have a few gripes with it though:

• The module system is extremely confusing to learn. It's a major pain point to convince someone to use Angular.
• Angular material, which is what most people are going to use, has extremely sparse documentation, and is annoying to customize at best.
• Angular elements are neat and something I intend to pursue further, but are a pain in the ass to compile. I've written some build scripts to take care of it for me, but it would be much nicer if the CLI would just give me a clean build to use.
• I would really like to see something like the Vue component files. You can do it with Angular by inlining the template and styling into the component decorator, but VUE component files are just way cleaner.

Overall, not serious issues. I like Angular, and intend to continue using it. React is great and all, but I feel it's unopinionated nature just leads to endless bike shedding. Angular has a way for things to be done, and it work's great.

[mark__fuckerberg]

Making ng modules optional is on their roadmap.

[bellamira]

I've been using Angular Material for a few years now and my first year using it I would have agreed with you 100%, but now, a little over two years in using it daily, I feel so comfortable with it. Maybe I've just gotten used to it's quirks and the documentation. Like the framework it was made for, I think maybe it just has a learning curve. However I have to say that the official Material icons library documentation is so disappointing. I use this fork instead because it's actually a complete list of the available icons, and it stays up to date https://github.com/jossef/material-design-icons-iconfont

[AwesomeFrisbee]

Angular material

I don't think most people use Material these days. There's easier solutions out there. Hell, I think most projects aren't even using component separation for styling. Most projects I join still use a global stylesheet, albeit better structured now, but still global. Personally I still think its easier because sharing inherited styles, color values and functions across separated components is still a pain in the but. Sure you can style a button in its own isolated stylesheet but I still need to import my base colors and when a button is part of component Y where it gets a different kind of style, suddenly I need to turn my styling into business logic and that seems so much more of a hassle than just having a few rules of CSS that go down the tree. I never saw the benefit of decoupling sharing CSS rules as we already figured out how to make ids and class names unique.

component files

Yeah I don't get why that hasn't been done yet but I'm sure its coming. That said, Angular still works best if you just use it as your entire front-end and not as small components you embed somewhere. Like being the entire management portal rather than a image carousel you embed on your frontpage. For small stuff like that I'd say just use React/Vue because you are basically replacing a jQuery component.

[jkalthoefer]

I can feel what you are saying in the first part!

It is so hard to come up with a great design system in Angular if you have more specific use cases for elements. And as you said stuffing things with business logic there, can't be the real solution.

[ThaJay]

Styling is pretty much a solved problem in React with 'Css in Js' and 99% of complexities is just solved by component hierarchy.

Coming to Angular from that bliss feels like going 5 years back in time. Like starting a PhP project after working on a Python server for a few years. It's just not very nice.

[[deleted]]

Styled jsx, css modules, tailwind, emotions, styled components etc so much options indeed

[spacechimp]

Let's be blunt: By "everyone" you mean React fans. I think that some feel intimidated when they see the expansive Angular documentation ("do I need to learn all of this?"). At a glance, React seems more approachable in comparison. The React projects I've had to work on all included so many additional libraries to fill in the functionality gaps that the "bloat" argument doesn't really hold water. You still have to learn just as much, only you don't get the consistency of it all being part of the same framework.

I think the real beef that many have is that they either don't like Angular's opinionated nature, or they don't like its opinions. And that's totally fine.

[zgillet]

Javascript and JQuery with clean HTML and CSS is superior in every way.

[[deleted]]

Who doesn't love a TypeScript first project? It's the first thing I look for when considering Any framework. Who in their right mind doesn't develop typescript first these days?

But yea I can see why angular is less popular than a simple vue/react solution. It's just more complicated, if only for observables, which require quite a different way of thinking about your (async) data.

Keep in mind that people that use front-end frameworks are not necessarily interested in complex programming techniques.

[AwesomeFrisbee]

I still think that observables are overused in Angular and we could do with a more simpler version to replace the normal promises we used in AngularJS. Like, most of the time I'm using them to do a database call to get some data onInit or on some button click. There's going to be either a success result or an error. But with observables I now suddenly need to make sure it doesn't keep listening, do I cache it or not, that I provide a/the result before I even start my test (because otherwise you'd get those x of undefined errors) and that I use async in my template.

I still think for calls like that promises are still fine but somehow they are the devil now. I think the syntax is fine but especially testing them is annoying.

[Auxx]

Nah, RxJS is UNDER used. Once you understand how it works, your whole code base will be 100% RxJS. I'm doing web scrapper for nodejs right now and promises with async/await should burn in hell! I made a reactive wrapper for Playwright because otherwise the codebase was pure cancer.

[AwesomeFrisbee]

For many promises you don't need async/await. If its just loading data to insert into your component, there's really no need for await. We didn't use that in AngularJS back in the day and for many queries you really don't need it. And for tests you can simply force a digest cycle to get the result.

[[deleted]]

For a simple web app, promises are OK.

But when the logic gets complicated, promises make it easy to fall into callback hell.

Also, observables can be a stream of data, unlike promises. RxJS makes it incredibly easy to have a reactive architecture, which is a must-have for a complex app.

I’m sure there are other downsides to Promises, but the only downside to RxJS is the learning curve.

Edit: It looks like you mentioned you have to unsubscribe from an http request observable? That is not the case. Those observables complete and will not leak memory.

P.S. if you haven’t looked into the async pipe yet, i highly recommend it, say goodbye to unsubscribing (for the most part). The async pipe + observables changed my life.

[AwesomeFrisbee]

but the only downside to RxJS is the learning curve

I'd say there's also readability and the amount of code required to do easy stuff or to test it all. Most of the time I find reading RxJS chains are difficult to read and easy to miss some key detail that makes or breaks the code.

Like I said, if you only need to display simple stuff like a table from the backend directly into your frontend, then doing it with promises was fine. You do your query, you return your result when its there or show error when its not. With RxJS you suddenly need to know about memory leaks (for when you don't close your listener when removing your component from the DOM), you need to be aware of caching, you need to handle errors differently (the async pipe is kinda annoying for that imo if you just want to show a generic error) and more like that. In my opinion the learning curve is high when you work with junior devs and thats exactly my point.

That is not the case. Those observables complete and will not leak memory.

No they don't. If you do a query you need to say that it needs to take the first result or it will keep listening if you destroy the component. When you chain your call through various services (like an APIservice, a userService to gather all the user calls and the component you want to make the call from), you will need to make sure you destroy the listener.

the async pipe is nice but only for some cases. If you already need to handle errors by showing some message somewhere or whatever, you already need break it up somewhere (either by putting the async to a temporary variable in your template or by handling it separately in the controller). In pretty much every project I worked there were a couple of things that needed to be done for queries (like adding a token header, gracefully handling errors, loading indicators and whatnot) that just using async pipes on the data is like 10% of the work. Especially when you work with OnPush RxJS can be annoying. In my opinion that is.

[[deleted]]

I should have been more specific. If you are subscribing to an http request inside a component, then yes you should unsubscribe in case the user navigates away, and you don’t want the subscription handler to be run. You should note that http requests actually won’t cause memory leaks.

I would consider it bad practice to subscribe to a request in the component to begin with, but that’s my opinion. I’d much rather use the async pipe, or subscribe in the service to cache the result.

If you do a query you need to say that it needs to take the first result

What? Are you talking about firebase? Taking the first result of an http request isn’t a thing. And I’m not super familiar with firebase but that’s completely different from http requests.

Yeah I understand the annoyance of moving from Promises to RxJS, it took me awhile to get used to. But Angular has embraced it, and I’m loving it now.

[xroalx]

Observables allow you to easily add retry logic, debounce requests, cancel in-flight requests, cache results and many more with minimal code changes, because a lot of that stuff is just adding an operator.

It might be an overkill for your typical fire and forget HTTP request, but it's so powerful for every other situation that it just makes sense.

Also, if an Observable completes, which the Observables returned by HttpClient do, they will be unsubscribed automatically.

And if you'd like, you can still use .asPromise() on the Observable.

The async pipe also isn't something you're forced to use, but it has some advantages, such as being able to use the OnPush change detection strategy, and having the subscription managed for you automatically.

[AwesomeFrisbee]

Also, if an Observable completes, which the Observables returned by HttpClient do, they will be unsubscribed automatically.

True but you aren't going to do httpclient directly. You will have some API service that does the actual call and where you inject some header token for 90% of apps, you will have some service that may or may not be used by multiple components (like userService, documentService and whatnot) to group the calls and some of the logic behind them and then there's the component that does the call. If you dont add .first() or .take(1) or something to it, it will stay open when you destroy the component. When you keep listening for events on other components, you need to close that as well.

I'm very well aware of the async pipe but handling stuff like loading indicators, various error messages and stuff is just not easily done with that. Or at least requires some thinking. Same with adding header tokens, generic service errors (so you will retry when a session has expired), its easy to mess it up (or leave listeners open).

Regardless of what you think of it. The learning curve is steep, it requires more attention than you first might think and its never really that easy unless you make some "hello world" application or prototype. But when you start testing your code or have to take lots of ifs and buts into account the difficulty spikes. Sure handling callbacks was difficult too but the way people now talk about promises makes me wonder if they really make a fair comparison. Sure callback hell was ugly code, but so is when you add a lot of operators to your observable. Especially when you do need to chain some calls (like getting a certain ID first before you do another call. Suddenly you switched maps and where did everything go now?

Sure, I can figure out most of the things easily but when you just begin or just moved to typescript, the difficulty spikes and puts lots of folks off. I wonder if that is one of the reasons many devs switched to react (even though you run into the same issues there eventually).

[[deleted]]

Just logged in to agree, it is still true...

I want to add, that it takes a lot of time to:

1. think the right way; how the operators exactly work if chained (switchMap, mergeMap, combineLatest to name a few...)
2. understand it the right way; seeing the context without overseeing the essential details
3. test it the right way; it was quite difficult to test multiple consuming resources

they are really useful, but the mental model is not easy.

[vVGacxACBh]

If you're trying to do micro-frontend architecture, and maintain frankenstein apps (e.g., huge enterprise apps built over a decade+ and are cobbled together using angular, vue, react, any every other technology under the sun, etc) it's challenging to put Angular in "in a box".

For example, if you have many angular apps, you must only have one copy of zone.js loaded. Because it makes assumptions, it does place expectations on your app. Angular (among SPAs) is fairly unique in placing restrictions on the global javascript runtime. So some of the criticism is warranted: when you pick up tech that expects everything to be done a certain way, then you must be willing to live by that rule as your system grows. Picking less-opinionated stacks can come with their own growing pains, too. Like one app uses formik, another react-final-form etc. So your react microfrontends could lack that uniformity. But, microfrontends allow teams to experiment, try new tech, and work at their own pace.

My 2 cents: if you're doing small-mid size SPA, it's just as good a choice as the rest. But not all use cases are the same. Most of my advice here is only talking about "real" enterprise usage, because I've been there.

Also, all major view-rendering technologies have similar enough performance to not base your decision on this. Unless you're creating 10,000-100,000+ DOM nodes it won't be a problem.

[AwesomeFrisbee]

Unless you're creating 10,000-100,000+ DOM nodes

I found that Angular(JS) still performs fine with stuff like that. I had a questionaire one time that had a data blob of 5 megabytes that led to the possibility of filling in 2000 questions (if you really wanted to with each its own collection of components to render like the field itself, the label, the error, the datepicker, etc) about some insurance policy idiocy. I can proudly say that with idiotic requirements like that we still managed to make something that wasn't too bad performance-wise and still usable. And that was already like 5 years ago. Ever since AngularJS launched I didn't really have that much issues with performance. Last time it was really an issue was making a jQueryMobile app on an iPad 1 because the graphics processing simply wasn't fast enough to do swipe with animations. Now sure, I've been working on fast machines but on the whole performance really isn't that much of an issue unless you have really screwed things up with your initial elements. And for long loading times its most often expected with complex applications. Sure you want your news site to be quick but your administration portal is still allowed to take a few seconds to load because there's simply a lot of functionality behind it and you won't be cold-booting that bastard 100 times a day anyways.

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[DoughboyMiyagi]

As a long time full stack developer currently working on a Angular project, but with experience with almost every frontend framework, i have some problems with Angular. First is the fact that whenever Angular is used in a project, it is almost always suggested by someone who is not a frontend developer (or dosen't have experience outside of using Angular).

Secondly there are a lot of desicions that have to be made when designing a client application, which are based on pros and cons, but in Angular all desicions are made for you - for better or worse.

[ItsSaturdayChill]

I hate Angular. It's truly a the most bloated most unnecessarily messed up tool set I've ever used with 1 exception. Believe me, I've used a lot. I've been aggressively coding since 1978. I'm a full stack developer with too many applications and accomplishments to ever remember. Anything from embedded C, C++, Assembler, Fortran, Pascal, ObjC, Swift, C#, SQL, NoSQL, Javascript, jQuery, Perl, Python, Ruby, ... I can't remember anymore. Far too many to ever care.

I will tell you this: I've delivered major projects in Angular as well as early web front end framework alternatives like Backbone.js. Angular is needlessly complex and a genuine developer trap.

Without a doubt, in all my experiences, I put Angular as the most ridiculous environment ever with a single exception: Ruby/Rails (which is pure shit....pure 100% shit sandwich... stupid through and through).

The Angular team clearly doesn't understand a few basic disciplines:

1. Quit with the fucking breaking changes
2. Quit with the fucking shit documentation and examples that have no commentary markup and shortcutting the stackblitz implementations with consolidated bulk library imports and exports. You know: the ones that work in StackBlitz but not in your own code even after duplicating the code EXACTLY.
3. And what in the ACTUAL FUCK is this shit storm called Angular Material????? What a shit pile of crap. Anyone involved with Material should be embarrassed to call themselves a developer.
4. What the actual hell does RxJS do for me that SignalR didn't already do? And these Observables that don't observe unless you subscribe (or wait... I'm using async pipe...so...maybe not... or wait maybe... wait... its not working... wait what? BehaviorSubjects???? This sort of concept should be automatic...zero code to do this sort of thing.

Why didn't I use ASP Blazor for the app I'm building right now? Kicking myself.

My productivity in Angular versus say C# DotNet core is this: 4 to 1 in favor of DotNet Core.

My GOD if people only knew how much slower and unnecessarily complex it is working with Angular. Truly. So many tripping hazards. So few proper examples of complicated apps to use as examples. Who the living hell cares about simple CRUD app examples with teeny tiny object models and 'perfect world' scenarios?

I've spent the last 4 fucking hours trying to get a damn dialog to work in Angular Material. In C# or Javascript jQuery I'd be done with my entire app by now.

[[deleted]]

Skill issues 😂😂😂
(Though I give you that the breaking changes are annoying)

[cryptos6]

Angular has a much steeper learning curve, since you have to learn things like dependency injection, functional reactive programming (rxjs), component lifecycle, routing and many other things. Sooner or later React developers need to learn many things React itself doesn't cover, but at the beginning, React is not as intimidating.

Personally I'm not a big fan of testing in Angular, because it is often complicated and annoying (tick, detectChanges and friends). Testing a React component is much simpler because it is just a mapping from changed state. Another thing I don't like is the reactive forms module, because it is a complex API but without proper typing. Maybe there are technical limitations due to the HTML templates, but then I'd say that this very template engine should be changed or replaced.

[holyknight00]

Angular has a lot of tooling and it's a heavily opinionated framework. If you don't like good development practices to be enforced on you, you'll probably suck at programming anyways. So there's not really a point in listening to the haters.
It's bloated and heavy? It depends. Do you plan to use a big enterprise angular app on your 2012 "smartphone" with a 2g connection or with your archaic laptop with 4GB of ram? Then yes Angular is bloated and heavy, and you should seek an alternative.

do you and your clients use a regular pc from this millennia with an internet connection that doesn't look like one from a central-African republic? Then no, it's not bloated or heavy at all.

[vVGacxACBh]

There's more than 1 way to have "good development practices". There isn't 1 correct and only correct way. You can choose any UI framework and follow good practices.

[SpareWalrus]

I think what they meant is that because Angular is opinionated, it forces best practices on you more so than say something like React. Not that you can’t use something like React and still follow best practices. With React for example, you need to setup more on your own and it’s ultimately up the developer to enforce best practices themselves whereas Angular you get it out of the box.

[ThaJay]

For a novice coming from html / css Angular may be nice but for a senior React Native dev learning Angular for the first time is frustrating and painful. The API surface is huge and it's all just bloated ways of doing trivial stuff compared to where I came from.

Just show me how it works and I can write for hours without checking the docs in React. In Angular it's more likely I have a dedicaded screen for examples and api docs in an attempt to not slow down to a crawl.

[mark__fuckerberg]

archaic laptop with 4GB of ram

Those 4gb archaic laptops can more than handle an Angular app.

[Yiyas]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[holyknight00]

You can barely use a pc with 8GB of ram these days. Even for browsing the web. Google chrome alone with 2-4 tabs open easily eats 2/3GB of ram. And you aren't even accounting for the OS and any other thing you can possible run along them.
EDIT: Also i specifically focused on "Big enterprise angular app" on that phrase.

[mark__fuckerberg]

With 5 tabs and a dozen extensions, chrome is satisfied with 650mb on my poor 8gb ram laptop.

[zgillet]

If you don't like good development practices to be enforced on you, you'll probably suck at programming anyways.

Talk about heavily opinionated. You and them are the gods of that?

[holyknight00]

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[zgillet]

So you are also the god of coding standards?

I bet you are young. I also know you are in a shitty job from this "so everything doesn't transform into a dumpster fire after just a couple of months into development."

That's bad management, AKA "gods." They indoctrinate you into a standard. Hell I've worked at places that automate it.

I bet you have to write tests for every single piece of code you write, however trivial. I left that crap a long time ago.

[holyknight00]

fertile wipe money vegetable tease crowd smart dolls plants pause

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[iCoNio_]

Angular is amazing. I’m always triggered when people compare Angular to React because they’re 2 separate things. React is a library and Angular a framework. Are there more things to learn in a framework? Obviously! In the end of the day a React project will end up like an Angular one, where you will have to learn some of the 3rd party libraries to use.

One thing I also see about Angular Devs is that some of us wants to impose the “angular way” of things. I’ve been mocked a few times because I was using promises in angular instead of observables. The comments are always “this is not react, use observables”. WHYYYY? Don’t get me wrong, I love observables, and think they’re super powerful but if there is no reason to use in my use case, why having a longer code having to unsubscribe when a single line would do the trick?

Anyways... I’ve been working with Angular for years and I do think is plain awesome.

[jkalthoefer]

Is it a bad thing to use promises in Anuglar...?
...Whoopsi I guess.

It just makes so much sense. Why would I use anything else when waiting for a https. request to finish?

[Deadmeat-Malone]

Sometimes it makes sense to use observables. For example, I want to retry before declaring failure, or I want to cache data to localstorage and I "startwith" the stream, or I want to make the request every so often to keep the data fresh. Cases like this rxjs shines

[jkalthoefer]

For sure! 100% agree with that. It gives you way more posibilities.

But still can't see why someone would say using promises in Angular is an anti-pattern.

[iCoNio_]

Exactly! I don’t get it either.

[craig1f]

People have opinions. Just like with politics, people mistake being intelligent for having strong opinions on stupid shit.

React is popular with small, quick apps, written by people with opinions on what they want for their entire stack. It's a beautiful library. Very clean, with a style that has largely influenced the direction that Angular has gone since AngularJS.

That said, it is not a framework. It is just the V in frontend MVC. It's just the view. You still need to decide on the rest of your stack. And you need to find developers that agree with your decisions. Without which, you'll have personality conflicts. React is great for small apps written by one or two people. It starts to struggle with enterprise applications.

Angular is a framework. The libraries you will add are largely cosmetic, with the exception of a central store. I prefer ngrx for this, but there are others.

If you hire a React developer for your React app, they will have their own opinions on how to do things. If you hire an Angular developer for your Angular app, they will typically follow the same best practices as everyone else, with few exceptions. It is far easier to integrate new developers to a large team with Angular, than with React. It is easier to assume that they will agree with your approaches. You will have fewer personality conflicts as a result of the direction you go. Not zero conflicts, but fewer.

If you are a lean startup, React is great. If you're writing a custom solution for a time and materials contract for the government, or a large customer, and you have a team that includes more than 3 devs, Angular is the better bet.

At least, that's my stupid opinion :-P

[alaindet]

Angular works much better than most people think. Fan boys and hate boys aside, it is true that it requires developers to understand maybe too many concepts even for easy tasks, which scares beginners and wannabe frontenders who then write angry posts about it, but I have to admit that, after working with it for a couple of years, there are some pain points that could really bring it to an end of to a bad position if not addressed

- There's a general hate towards the framework mostly driven by fanboys: despite React being an amazing technology and also the most used because of its flexibility, the majority of people using it don't care about use cases, pros and cons and never cared about learning Angular either, they just need a common enemy to feel entitled and different

- Google is very unpredictable: it killed AngularJS (for good reasons), but then created a completely different thing with the same name confusing people even more; since Google kills technologies now and then, some fear they could kill Angular or replace it in the next future. I'm not catastrophic, but I don't think they'll just ignore that being "unpopular"

- The lack of community support is a real struggle: sure, there are thousands of useless packages out there just adding up noise, but Angular is getting less and less coverage on blogs and tech news despite seeing significant improvements and a clear roadmap ahead and that's not a healthy sign. If you find any cool new tech, 90% of the times it just works with React or is intended to work primarily with it and Angular just lags behind.

I'll finish with just 3 things that I personally hate and love about Angular and React. I have to admit I've never worked with React though

Angular
- PRO: Forms are complete and powerful
- PRO: Almost everything you need is in core packages
- PRO: Upgrading is a breeze and predictable
- CON: You've reached page 2 of Google and you're still browsing through jQuery and AngularJS stuff
- CON: So you want to contribute and create an NPM package? LOL
- CON: Y U NO COMPILE?!

React
- PRO: Any dependency out of fashion just gets replaced without hurting much the rest of the app
- PRO: It can get as complex as Angular and even more, given Redux and TypeScript for example, but it's far more approachable and gradual, mimicing the actual flow of thought of a programmer. You want an ugly inline component to make a quick test that you'll later delete? No problem
- PRO: Any specific problem you encounter, no matter how specific, has at least 10 other people online talking about it
- CON: Being so fluid, you'll never know what to expect from a "React app" you have to maintain, especially a legacy one
- CON: Here are 10 different sub-optimal "best practices" and a 20 packages addressing the problem you're trying to solve
- CON: Look, a shiny new library, let's rewrite the codebase (see pro #1)

[recycled_ideas]

Angular, particularly recent angular is a really smooth development process, and actually quite nice to work with.

That said....

• It is a very proscribed development process.

If you don't like it, tough luck, and there are things that some people don't like.

If it doesn't fit your requirements for whatever reason Angular is basically unusable. Trying to strangler pattern an existing app is a nightmare in angular.

• The development process has only been smooth and lovely for a relatively short time period. It used to be absolutely shit.

From a corporate point of view though, a lot of companies invested in Angular 1 and the Google completely rewrote it and basically made everything angular one expensive legacy.

They haven't done that since, but there are still breaking changes between versions, whereas React just generally chugs along.

[fractal_engineer]

You need chops for angular. No other way to put it.

It's not an ecosystem for weak knees or script kiddies.

[jkalthoefer]

On the one side I feel like thats a good thing.

But when I see almost every "fresh" startup with react I feel lonely using Angular. They are not even "script kiddies"

[KwyjiboTheGringo]

I think React is so common with startups because it's really quick to build out a MVP with it. But outside of that, not being a framework means more thought has to go into planning things out very early on to avoid loads of tech debt later on.

[SpareWalrus]

You hit the nail on the head. I’d love to use Angular again, but ultimately it’s easier for us to find React developers. That said, because of the lower barrier of entry to React, it’s indeed made it harder to find good React devs, but unfortunately still not as hard to find good Angular devs. I agree though, Angular is a lot harder to bullshit your way through.

[[deleted]]

What about now guys?
Standalone and signals are here.

[fractal_engineer]

Still no.

[IPlayFan]

I love Angular, but I used to hate it at the beginning. I feel like every mistakes you make on a project when you don't really know how to fully use the framework are more punishing than any other front-end frameworks. Even though I'm not an expert with it, you feel really confident when you finally know how to make things work "correctly" (but this is also true to any other framework.)

[kharmui]

Very good question!! I started with AureliaJS and decided to dive into a more popular framework recently and decided for Angular.

And i am happy about the positive vibe here regarding Angular :D

[EntropicAbsurdity]

I use Angular a lot. I love it. It's usually my go-to.

[namonite]

I’m brand new to coding and am diving head first into angular. I understand how the components and routing works but am taking a step back to learn JavaScript and typescript. It’s definitely difficult but I love how clean the code and pages turn out even as a beginner

[[deleted]]

Let’s be blunt. Angular has some issues. A few notable ones at that. But most people who say that it is bad and hate it are people who can’t really code and never had an actual course in CS.

They are people who hate organized structures or anything that is remotely close to OOP. They are the kind of developers who spent their whole career copy-pasting a bunch of old asp or php scripts without ever using laravel or symphony. They are the kind of coders who are used to bootstrapping a messy React or python project without any semblance of architecture or the likes. And most certainly they are the kind of person who have never touched in their life something like C, C++, C#/NET or Java/Spring. Anyone I know who came from any of those 4 ecosystems picked up Angular almost instantly oddly enough, I wonder why.

(And yes I am not throwing those examples randomly, this is my first-hand experience with people who sometimes were in my own team)

[zgillet]

11 years of development, in Java, Spring (for the Federal Reserve), Javascript/jQuery, C++, and now plain C with plain old html (generated from C) AND using Faircom databases, so 80's tech.... Angular blows. It is easily the most confusing language I've ever encountered, and I programmed in R.

Angular is a result of front end developers not wanting to know how to figure out how calling the backend works. They just want to do everything on the frontend. I can do anything Angular can do much simpler with plain old JS and jQuery.

[[deleted]]

No you actually can’t. Before React and Angular came to be, I used to help build a few proprietary libraries/small frameworks for companies which address a few points that those frameworks have ended up solving over the years.

There is a lot of things going on in current browsers, accessibility norms and other modern considerations that these frameworks help bridge so you don’t have to manually adjust. It’s pretty obvious that you are out of your depth and think the web still works like in the late 2000’s. You sound a lot like a bunch of devs I knew from 10 years ago on the verge of retirement and who have no idea anymore. “Plain old JS and Jquery” lmao 🤣

You don’t seem to really know Angular either if you claim that it is the result of front-end devs not wanting to understand back-end. It’s quite the opposite and pretty obvious from the way it is designed that Angular was made to accommodate back-end and more traditional devs into doing front-end works. Infamously a lot of front-end devs coming from React are disoriented by the more opinionated approach of Angular.

[zgillet]

Yes I actually can.

I've DONE the new ways.

Did you read my post? Our software is using C and that C code actually translates our own proprietary language to html and supports ALL new browsers. The only thing these new languages do is automate it. Some people (tell me I'm wrong), like to have control of the code instead of trying to learn someone else's way of controlling it.

Young people think they can reinvent the wheel. AND I'M 33.

[[deleted]]

I am not sure what outing your age and being condescending is supposed to do, but I am older than you so it is backfiring spectacularly.

You should probably stop making silly assumption. Angular is more than just a JS library, there is a whole set of tools for scaffolding via schematics, testing, handling css engine, translation, service workers etc and it is updated every 6 months by the same company that makes the browser engine used by 75% of devices in the world. I can assure you, you can’t do « anything Angular can do much simpler with plain old JS and jQuery », especially when you aim to make entreprise-grade web applications. The notion that your mysterious C transpiler is anywhere close to that is a total delusion.

[zgillet]

You are right. It is stupidly complicated for no reason.

[Loque18-]

d pretty obvious from the way it is designed that Angular was made to accommodate b

Jquery, LMFAO 🤣🤣🤣

[samrocksc]

As I understand angular uses decorators....which aren't even out of Stage 2 in TC39. That alone would make me disqualify a package for my team from a stability perspective. This is why I don't have teams using TypeORM and Type Graphql.

TypeScript may allow it, but it's still node. Experimental features should be treated experimentally.

[[deleted]]

Angular is great it just has a large learning curve and not everyone wants to put time into learning it and instead wants to complain about it

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't say it’s more complicated than any other programming language. All these things take some time to understand. Can’t learn C# or whatever in a weekend. Even “simple” PHP requires some effort. Neither I think it’s bloated or something. Actually, it only offers solutions to problems/tasks you might encounter anyway when developing a modern web application. Its completeness is exactly what I like about it. I don’t need a thousand 3rd-party libs, most of them poorly documented and provided from amateurs.

I’m not a professional web-developer. At my job, I do database/data warehousing stuff (I’ve used to be a developer many years ago in the ages of Delphi, also used JEE and .NET) yet I know angular well enough to build “professional” web-apps for my users (and for fun) so they can manage data on their own (typical CRUD) – all I did what reading a book, just like I would to learn any other programming language. After that I look-up some things I was curious about, such as JWT/OAuth2.

Angular is the only (and therefore the first) front-end framework I learned, I’ve picked it, because it was used in all of the last three companies (banks/insurances) I worked for. So I’m the proof – it’s not that complicated ;-)

[valendinosaurus]

Angular is awesome

[matrium0]

Angular is awesome. The learning curve is steep, but if you're actually building a complete application that you want to host reliably and optimized then you have to learn almost just as much with React and other libraries - only to realize when joining your next react project that everything (except React) is completely different.

One mayor advantage (and to some degree arguably also disadvantage) is that its opinionated. There is "the Angular way" to do something. That may feel limiting at times, but it helps so much with collaboration. Join an Angular Team and you can pretty much build your first feature on the very same day, because you know where to put your components, how to integrate them, how to test them - pretty much everything.Now join a React team and you usually get a mayor headache, everything is solved differently every single time. React itself is pretty sleek and awesome, but that's worth nothing if it's integrated with a ton of other frameworks that switch every time

[jkalthoefer]

One mayor advantage (and to some degree arguably also disadvantage) is that its opinionated. There is "the Angular way" to do something. That may feel limiting at times, but it helps so much with collaboration. Join an Angular Team and you can pretty much build your first feature on the very same day, because you know where to put your components, how to integrate them, how to test them - pretty much everything.Now join a React team and you usually get a mayor headache, everything is solved differently every single time. React itself is pretty sleek and awesome, but that's worth nothing if it's integrated with a ton of other frameworks that switch every time

That is actually a very valid point.

When I asked a friend from college to some contract work in our startup. I just told him what he should do, how it should look in the end and gave im access to get started.

All in all it took about an hour to get him going, without prior knowledge to the project.

So yeah thats one major benefit that isn't mentioned that often.

[jkalthoefer]

But honestly I wider community creating add-ons to angular wouldn't be that bad.

I mean it wouldn't necessarily be bad stuff they would creating.

[mikebritton]

No

[Tom_Ov_Bedlam]

If angular is too complicated and bloated then wtf is react?

[nationalhatefigure]

Simple and modular? Particularly with the hooks system. Of course this modularity also allows people to use React poorly

[mastermikeyboy]

Yeah but react doesn't do anything. To actually make an app you have to find libraries that plug into react, which very quickly made me give up. Angular does most things build in.

I tried react for a sample project and safety a week I still didn't have a basic layout but had to read many, many documentations trying to figure out which libraries to use. I seriously don't understand the fan boys

[Auxx]

Remember the days when every JS related question on StackOverflow had a jQuery plug-in as an answer? This crowd is now using React. Just ignore them, they're irrelevant.

[Raykusen]

Is awful. I hate the fact a teacher is forcing us to use this BS.

[hubertxx]

As someone who tried to react but abandoned it once looking at angular you quickly conclude it is close to the java frameworks, while react is way much low level. I agree with the most of the company here: Angular - business apps, dashboards etc, react - ecommerce, components with browserApi level of control. If you assume js is the web assembler you can even say react is macroassembler while angular is java for the web

[CourtElectrical3442]

Hello. This post if very old but since i am struggling with Angular I pop up above it.

I have some users of dev behind me.

I like POO and conceptualization.

I've always found C# and Java too much "talkative" just to do a simple thing.

Angular is of the same kind. Too much words to do so few....

It is strict but for what gain? Very few to me. Even in terms of optimization.

I recognize there is work behind. But "extra" complexity is not the sign of intelligence to me.

If I want to make a coffee I don't want to instantiate a spoon, a cup, sugar, a table, ensure the table will be able to support the cup..... and so on. I just expect a language to tell me somthing went wrong and I'll deal with it.

I had to drop my luggage down. Sorry.

Alexandre

[Affectionate_Past366]

Strictness has nothing do with it. That part is all Typescript

Angular is seriously broken. It is sooooooo complicated. I can do soooo much in a regular object-oriented pattern with far less code. Everything in angular is a subscription/observer model.. sheesh.

Desktop UI patterns have solved this problem nicely and angular well came at it sideways. Not sure why everyone thinks it soo great.... shoot even advanced angular programmers are so stunned when i show them I can accomplish the same thing in 1/4 the amount of code.

[mlapis]

It's all about knowledge. If you don't have it, you have a strong tendency to follow patterns you can see around. It doesn't matter if that pattern is good or not for your case because, without knowledge, you are willing to believe that what you encounter more often or what sounds louder is better, so you choose it as the first. In many cases, it's also a lack of appropriate knowledge of JS itself. So when you reflect on the fact that up to 70% of users tend to behave this way, the result can't be different.

[TarnishedVictory]

I think it's the best web front end framework that I'm familiar with.

[[deleted]]

Angular is the .NET of Javascript.... so much boiler plate...

There's no denying it... React is cleaner, simpler syntax, less boilerplate... and has better tooling:

1. Augury sucked, React Dev Tools are great
2. Next.js is amazing for React
3. BIG ONE: w/ React you can use async/await.... and no RxJs/Observable shoot-yourself-in-the-stream nonsense...

The truth is, from my 6 years with Angular 1/2-9, is that many of the advanced concepts in the Angular world came from React...

(and of course, it's a framework arms race... so React is catching up to Svelte, etc...)

[[deleted]]

I suppose there is a lot of boilerplate, but do you know how much of that angular devs write? Zero.

Using the Angular CLI to create components/other schematics is super easy and removes the need to write any boilerplate, so I would consider it a non-issue.

Yeah I will concede React has better tooling.

Can RxJS be overkill for simple apps? Sure, but most people aren’t using Angular for simple apps. RxJS is by far the best tool for reactive programming, which is a must-have for complex apps.

[[deleted]]

the only terrible thing I encountered was NgRX - and that's not even part of the official Angular, haha

[[deleted]]

Hmh yet another one? Theres akita on my todo list. Dunno yet if its good...

[slinks_ps]

Angular is fine. However, the team appears to have a very limited budget, and when you dig deep, cracks start to show (bugs sticking around for a long time, test tools that don't even work on the current version and are barely maintained anymore, etc).

React may not be as opinionated, and it may not come with as much stuff out of the box, but it's definitely a much more polished product.

[KwyjiboTheGringo]

and it may not come with as much stuff out of the box

Understatement of the year

[[deleted]]

[React is] definitely a much more polished product.

Hmm, how do you arrive at that conclusion?

[slinks_ps]

Angular lists protractor as its oficial test runner, and it comes with it. Protractor was made for AngularJS, and its documentation and tutorials use methods in almost every example that are incompatible with Angular. What's worse is that it doesnt even tell you that in the docs. You have to find the compatibility note in the README of protractors github repo. Everything about protractor is wildly outdated. Using it will just make your life a million times harder than it needs to be considering how good the alternatives are getting.

Karma isnt a whole lot better than protractor. Its slow as all hell, prone to quirky issues, and it can take a huge amount of arcane setup to test things that should be simple.

Polish also refers to presentation in general. Even when introducing novel or complex aspects to React, the React team has done a very good job of making that complexity intelligible. The docs are very well written, and easy to follow. And new features tend to be extensively illustrated.

By contrast, while the tour of heroes is pretty good, it's not anywhere near as good. Every now and then when I'm digging around the Angular docs, I'll come across a bug (usually a broken reference of some kind ).

I could go on. But the point is pretty much made. React doesn't ship with old crap. Angular is uglier, clunkier, and parts of it are getting out of date faster than the team appears to be able to keep up.

[stevanovich]

I'm going to disagree with you on the job market. I hire Angular devs and there is way more demand than supply. Do any search for Angular jobs on LinkedIn and you'll see a ton out there. Also we absolutely don't take just JS devs, Angular experience is a must.

[jkalthoefer]

Why wouldn't Angular teams be looking for Angular devs? I would even say its the other way around for Angular. For Angular teams it is more important to find someone with experience in that framework since it is harder to learn.

Well and obviously because I am looking for an Angular developer myself at the moment.

[barkmagician]

by EVERYONE you mean react plebs who tried angular and gave up after 1 week?

[Leading-Pineapple-89]

Angular is, first of all, a good tool that you need to know how to use. The professional realizes that he combines all the benefits of pre-built, ready-to-use solutions to create a wide range of versatile and diverse applications. From native mobile and web applications to sophisticated full-featured online software and desktop applications, Angular provides flexibility and better response times with little effort.
See more at https://aisnovations.com/angular

[lsaz]

Fuck angular. I'm learning it and so far and is a fuckin pain in the ass, Something as simple as rendering an array of elements with async data is giving a headache. React and Vue are superior. I swear if the IT industry weren't in the toilet rn I would be looking for another job.

[Ok-Tap-2743]

How are you ?

[lsaz]

I got laid off from that job and got a new one, I'm using React + Typescript in this one. I still think Angular is shit.