[mst]

The original Angular was, for its time, absolutely fantastic.

The state of the art has absolutely moved on but provided you were willing to understand its model (just like these days you need to understand React's model) it provided a power to performance ratio that nothing else in its class was capable of at the time.

[wwweston]

I was on a team that sunk 9 months into its model for a major project and what I saw bears no resemblance to what you're describing.

It's a framework that hated the idioms of its host language, as if the problem with front-end development was that it didn't have the ceremony of Java and the attendant abstractions/"patterns" of a static manifestly typed language. The conceptual overhead alone was ridiculous (as famously described here: http://codeofrob.com/entries/you-have-ruined-javascript.html ), and the payoff in terms of performance was negative on mobile no matter what we did. The fact that I had to know what the digest cycle was is a testament to the leaky nature of the abstractions. The tooling, wow, as far as I could tell batarang was actively broken for a good chunk of 2014 and 2015 and nobody had better suggestions.

I've used a lot of libraries/frameworks/languages with their own baggage but I've never had an experience where the differential between what I was hearing and the actual experience was that large, to the point where it's one of the first things I think of when it comes to the hazards of social proof.

If I wanted something that heavy again circa 2014, I'd tell myself to just use Ember. Hell, I'd rather use jQuery than Angular.

[scotty79]

No. It was not. It was jumbled mess of ad-hoc solutions. Many of the concepts that were core stuff of angular are completely forgotten now. It discovered nothing of value. I worked in a project that used it for almost a year. And none of what I learned about AngularJS was useful since then. Except from general notion of "avoid angular" and "treat frameworks that cram stuff into html with suspicion".