* a tribe
* a close-knit group
* an industry union
You do not assign blame to hundreds of thousands of professionals, who live in different parts of the world, speak different languages and work on different projects.
The web evolves without intelligent design or regard of your personal interests. Deal with it or withdraw in denial to the perfect land of perfect web technologies.
> * a tribe
> * a close-knit group
> * an industry union
unfourtunately
https://snowdrift.coop <-- this is a great example, btw
I do, primarily because it's yet another attempt in a long history of misguided attempts to bestow Turing completeness on XML.
- Polling for changes vs. event driven - two way data bindings causing infinite redraw loops. - "feels like O(n^2)" performance on ng-repeats / large pages
but things like the templating, directives, data-binding... they are all really good things.
And dependency injection! They have really moved the needle forward on client side testing.
No angular in itself is not a mistake at all. There are mistakes without question. I suspect the angular 2.0 release will address many of the major criticisms. Though, I haven't read much about it yet.
Why do you even need dependency injection and singleton services and factories in a dynamic language with closures and first-class functions? You don't. Client-side testing works fine without DI. Angular is just a way to do Java in JavaScript. It's a pile of unnecessary complexity designed to sell to enterprises that love over-designed Java projects and want to make client-side development feel more similar to what they know. In that regard I suppose Angular is a little better than Google Web Toolkit, but that isn't saying much.
It's nice to have a largely declarative way to specify markup but still allow simple loops and conditionals.
Hasn't every template language in the world has come to a similar conclusion?
No, not even every mainstream template language. For example, I still use ERB and EJS extensively, and so do many other engineers. ERB and EJS use the control flow constructs of the underlying languages (Ruby and JS, respectively).
There is of course debate about whether templates should expose the full power of a programming language. I have tried templating languages that do and ones that don't. For now, I'm sticking with templates that let me mix in arbitrary code as I see fit. Could I abuse that power and make a mess? Absolutely. But I try not to, and my code stays pretty maintainable.
Now all those companies are bogged down by Angular, but feel like ejecting it would be too costly. Elsewhere, lots of new developers are introduced to Angular and invest time and effort into learning it because they don't know any better.
Herd mentality is a big problem. It's basically the polar opposite of thinking for yourself, and as such, extremely detrimental in other aspects too.
The most ironic thing in all this is that your comment is still full of Herd mentality, except that it goes the other way.
Angular is a framework, period. Using it is neither a good or a bad idea, it all depends on the people who actually use it.
Honestly, if/when browsers have better support, I think something closer to Polymer may be the best of all worlds with web development... for now, I find that React code tends to be the most sensible (with a decent framework around it)... not to mention shared client-server code with node/io.js
I don't care about the turing completeness of angular.
If Angular has produced a local optima of efficiency in the range of "misguided attempts" then it's effect on the development ecosystem was a net positive.
That said, I am extremely concerned that most popular frameworks/libraries are products of megacorps.
I think a more important reason would be that Facebook/Microsoft/Google media influence and corporate support creates massive brand awareness and generates instant interest. Educational projects anticipate the interest from developers and create courses, tutorials and reviews. The cycle continues and bam! we have an information cascade[0].
Rich get richer and poorer get poorer (in developer mindshare). Megacorps reap the benefits while indie developers are not able to achieve critical mass.
I shudder when I think about the possible Typescript/Microsoft, Angular/Google, React/Facebook domination in web technologies.
Modularity and code re-use are like apple pie and motherhood. The real question is, do you need dependency injection and the factory pattern to get those things? In JavaScript, the answer is no you don't, because you have closures and first-class functions. Patterns like DI and Factory were invented to compensate for the deficiencies of Java, they are superfluous in JavaScript.
Even in those platforms (.Net and Java) unit testing is such a miserable experience, and adds so much complexity it's easier to just skip unit testing in favor of simpler classes/methods and better integration tests.
What's in fashion isn't what the recruiters are talking about, but what the developers are talking about. Recruiters will always lag a bit behind whats actually in fashion.
It's just like when your parents start listening to your (former) favorite musician.
Employers seem to be influenced by what the developers push (maybe not short term, but longer term it seems to me to be that way). Recruiters go where the employers are. Therefore, IMHO, ultimately its the (vocal) developers who pick the fashion.
Love, Past Me.
I managed to write a multi-page response explaining how the modern frameworks were moving away from jquery in favour of data bindings, virtual dom, etc... while I acknowledge that there is still a place for jQuery, it has a very much diminished role in modern web development.
In the end, I never sent the email in response. While it was cathartic to write, I really didn't want to come across as "sour grapes". (and truth be told, I respected their decision... I'd feel a better fit in a more technology forward environment, their reliance on "old faithful" technologies can still make money)
I feel like even angular has come-and-gone as a framework the 1.x just isn't performant on busy pages. Anything with a log of ng-repeats gets out of hand. Though I suppose that could also mean that I'm writing bad pages too.
My most recent favorite is Leo Horie's https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/ We've got some of that running in production and it really is beautiful to work with.
I'd like to try REACT, but haven't found the right project for it yet.
I've sortof started rambling here... my point was I share your experience with employers looking for "old" tech.
I think the reason I want to try react is to compare and contrast the various approaches.
I've written both angular & mithril for production. So far I haven't enjoyed anything as much as mithril. It is so clean & pure. It stays almost completely out of your way.
In fact there are places where I'm actually running angular INSIDE mithril pages (long story, part of migrating a project from angular to mithril, without losing legacy pages)
I would like to start a react project from scratch to see what it's like. To compare what one really, really smart guy (Leo) came up with against the mighty multibillion dollar facebook.
Leo has a day job and mithril is spare-time, facebook has a staff dedicated to react. Facebook is committed to working on react long term as a corporate strategy. Leo could get bored and walk away.
Additionally there's the aspect of looking at react-native. It makes me suspect that there may be a long term value in being aware of the patterns used in the react.
I struggle to believe it could be better than mithril, but who knows? I haven't tried it yet!
Finally there's the "learning things is fun" side of things.
But what if you're in a Starbucks, and the person behind you is the head of BMA Model's hands and feet division? (http://www.bmamodels.com/hands_legs_feet). As you reach for your frappachino you're "discovered" as the next-big-thing. About to explode into the glamorous, yet high stakes world of hand-modelling. It's a multi million dollar deal... but with the stipulation... no more coding effective immediately.
What happens to mithril then Leo? What then?
If it happened at facebook they'd give the job to Jimmy "Stubby Fingers" Malone and move on.
Obviously I'm teasing (hopefully at least).
I think there are actually a lot of advantages to your running mithril lean & (mostly) solo.
I've been impressed by seeing the contributors in github https://github.com/lhorie/mithril.js/issues and the quality of the discussions in the google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mithriljs ... to say nothing of how great your blog posts are.
You contribute and participate in all those places and even turn up on HN.
It does make it a consideration when selecting a direction for a project though. It's a bit of a risk awareness/tolerance thing. I still think C# is way better than node.js for some things too :)
After being in the JS sphere for a while and living with these changes, I have learned a lot. Because there is nothing new under the sun, these all do pretty much the same thing - but in different ways. There are tradeoffs, and by working with and making big and small products in different frameworks, I've learned how to learn. Picking up new things are not always needed, but the more you expose yourself to different libs, frameworks and platforms, the better you get at it.