Looking back, though, I might have said the same thing about Rails or Sinatra or Laravel, but they stood the test of time, and people still use them. A lot of what gives a framework longevity is just whether or not big players adopt them and developers love them, these two factors will go a long way in ensuring a framework continues to get upgrades and continuous maintenance. At least longer than Backbone, anyway.

So Angular is the COBOL of Javascript frameworks?

Actually, I think it's probably more comparable to some kind of Java FactoryProviderServiceFactory thing.

JavaScriptMVC/DoneJS has a pretty long history: http://blog.bitovi.com/longevity-or-lack-thereof-in-javascri...

CanJS, the MVVM part of DoneJS, is currently coming up to its third major/breaking version. I think that’s a pretty good track record for us/Bitovi.