You are right it was. But most people do not track all issues of all projects they depend on. While I'd love to do that, there's simply not much time.

I belive this should have been in an earlier RC or Beta. This way, more people would have tested ot, ir got a chance to read changelog (I follow the blog and check each beta release). If that window was missed, it should have gone for the next major release.

What I see is that Google announced AngularDart (http://news.dartlang.org/2013/11/angular-announces-angularda...). Dart has _ prefix for private fields. Then AngularJS team goes ahead and forces the same on the JS implementation.

Seems that there is always some political reason to mess with things at Google.

Many other languages and projects use underscores to indicate private properties, in particular Google's Closure. I also have no idea how standardizing on _ in names meaning private would do anything to push Dart in some hidden, evil agenda.

I think the change is reasonable, limiting AngularJS' expression to leak less information into the templates is a good idea IMHO, as described in particular with the new controller syntax.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but I have not been involved in this discussion at all.

I pay pretty close attention to the issues in the repo, but I apparently missed this. I am also a regular in #angularjs, and never seen it discussed there either, so while the discussion was public, I think it caught almost everyone by surprise.