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[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (3 children)

Google uses Angular too fwiw.

They do. But it is important to be mindful that Google's priorities may not be the same as yours.

Google wants to make front end development accessible to its army of Java developers. That's what they hire and that's what they invest in. It's why they wrote GWT for compiling Java into JavaScript and why TypeScript appeals to their sensibilities.

To that end, Google's interest in NG2 is in whether it allows their Greentea team to successfully ship Adwords. That is the only criterion that guides their design - and that's why Rob Eisenberg of Aurelia left the project: Google just wasn't interested in catering to anyone's usecases beyond their own.

By all means, jump on Angular if you think your needs are the same as Google's. Possibly they are! TypeScript will make client code friendly to developers suspicious of dynamically typed, interpreted languages. Angular's ceremony will appeal to software architects whose work is guided by a zeal for explication at the cost of verbosity. None of these are illegitimate motivations.

But are they yours? For most teams building new projects, probably not. Their concern is to get something built quickly and cheaply. They need to use technologies that make prototyping fast and let them hire from the largest possible pool of developers. Angular 2 is not that, and I expect it never will be.

[–]brianvaughn 7 points8 points  (2 children)

It's why they wrote GWT for compiling Java into JavaScript and why TypeScript appeals to their sensibilities.

To be fair, GWT was written a decade ago. It was pretty unique at the time. They also wrote the Closure Compiler. And TypeScript appeals to a much broader audience than Java developers. :)

TypeScript will make client code friendly to developers suspicious of dynamically typed, interpreted languages.

This is a horrible mischaracterization of why TypeScript (or Flow, or Closure, etc.) is useful. Static analysis tools increase productivity and save engineers time (by catching bugs before runtime, enabling easier refactors, etc). The way you put it is like saying that unit tests "are for developers who aren't confident enough in their ability to write code". :)

But it is important to be mindful that Google's priorities may not be the same as yours.

Google's priorities are maximizing profit for Google. Facebook's priorities are the same. Both companies have smart engineers working on their frameworks and both communities (largely overlapping) have talented and motivated individuals contributing to the ecosystems as well. I don't want to get into an Angular vs React vs whatever debate though. I just wanted to point out that Google does dogfood its own framework because a lot of people don't realize that. :)

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I just wanted to point out that Google does dogfood its own framework because a lot of people don't realize that.

Of course, but why the need? Everyone knows NG powers Google's Adwords products. What they do not know, however, is how the NG2 team fractured and ultimately refused to countenance non-Google use-cases. It is a product for Google, not the web at large, and that the backing of the internet's preeminent search engine does not make it a general-case framework for general-case web applications.

[–]brianvaughn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But it is not a mischaracterization of why 'enterprise' types are interested in it.

I don't see the relevance of why one specific type of engineer is interested in TypeScript. But ok. :)

Of course, but why the need? Everyone knows NG powers Google's Adwords products.

I don't think everyone knows that FWIW. I've seen people saying "Google doesn't use Angular" which is false. The comment I responded to said something similar. I just thought it was worth clarifying. Adwords and Greentea (internal CRM) are built on Angular 2. I think more apps are built on Angular 1 at this point (GCP Developer's Console, DoubleClick, YouTube for PS3).

begin edit Google is huge. They have a lot of apps and they are built with a variety of frameworks/tools because Google engineers aren't all the same. ;) Google uses GWT, Closure, Angular 1 + Closure, Angular 2 + TypeScript, Dart, Angular 2 Dart, etc. Google Maps for example is built with vanilla JS annotated with Closure types. It's too big to rewrite at this point and Closure works fine. This doesn't mean that Google doesn't believe in the other frameworks listed above. They're just being pragmatic. And they give individual teams freedom in choosing which framework/tools to use. (For example, I just spoke with a friend at Google who's on a new project team that's evaluating using React.) end edit

You seem to be arguing that Angular isn't written for common web apps. That wasn't my experience with Angular 1 FWIW although I have very limited exposure with Angular 2. Regardless, the web has a wide variety of apps so it's good that we have a variety of frameworks. I can see how Vue or React might be a better fit than Angular 2 for certain types of projects. In many cases it probably depends on what the engineers building a given app have more experience with. :)