[FLGMwt]

While that's in line with what the Angular team has communicated to differentiate 1.x and 2+, I disagree. Since "Angular" is unnamespaced and "AngularJS" is not disambiguated enough from "that JS library called Angular", I think the numbers are important to outsiders.

My org has been dealing with Angular and AngularJs for the past two years and developers and non-developers alike get confused or unclear all the time when we try to communicate about the two. The only thing that's been successful has been to describe them as "Angular 1.x" and "Angular 2+".

On top of that, when doing searches for documentation and issues, it's still absolutely necessary to add "2" to searches for the right version of the framework.

[swyx]

oh god. what an absolute mess of branding.

[FLGMwt]

It's pretty rough on newcomers as well as devs trying to find docs and blog posts, but in contrast to naming it something else, it was pretty effective at establishing a user base.

It would have been a lot easier on the world if 1.x was the last version of anything called Angular and Google named the new thing FooBarJS.

But Google knows how software teams work. Names and versions are easier to evaluate than trying things out or running comparative analysis.

Teams hire "Angular" developers which usually means "1 or 2" even though it very much shouldn't.

Teams will set aside time to "upgrade to Angular 2" more freely than they would set aside time to "switch to a different framework, FooBar.js", even though with Angular 2, those are the same.

Even if teams would set aside time to "Upgrade to new framework", they're much more likely to do a alternatives analysis if it's not just a version number changing.

That said, I think this hurts developers and teams, and I think it's loosely nefarious, but it was probably necessary for Angular 2 to get the adoption it has today.