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by dottjt 738 days ago
I'm currently learning Angular and it's an absolute dumpster fire of a framework in the sense that it offers no clear philosophy. It's just a jumbled mess of concepts and syntax.

I think where it shines though is that it's completely batteries included, which I can see being useful for large enterprises where it's near impossible to change things.

Having recently worked on a very legacy React app, it became apparent to me the value of frameworks like Angular. If you can maintain it and upgrade it gradually, React is arguably the better choice. But if you're leaving it to stagnate, Angular is a far better proposition.

2 comments

I think we're on the same page here. I've also found that a non-trivial number of teams actively maintaining React apps are still totally capable of rendering them into a state of dysfunction and paralysis in the same way that stagnating apps can devolve.

They think they don't need batteries included because it's 'bloat' or the opinionated patterns are inferior, but after a couple years they've got a couple dozen seriously bad patterns and a 400kb application that could easily be pared down to 100 or so.

This isn't so much a virtue of Angular or React specifically, but a reality of the deficiencies in our industry when it comes to the human side of the equation. These people would be better off following Angular's general conventions whether they realize it or not.

So much of Angular versus React is "No one got fired for picking Google tech" versus "No one got fired for picking Meta tech" with some of the obvious problems of their "parent" organizations' approaches visible in the maintenance efforts.