[lohankin]

The author specifically mentions Angular - probably that was the last straw. I want to tell you: I feel your pain! You are not alone!

I've been in the field for almost 35 years, and I think I've seen a lot. But Angular really stands out. It's absolutely the worst kludge ever unleashed into the field with so much hype, I can't remember anything like this since EJB, but EJB is a nice piece of engineering compared with this cake. And there's not much choice - others somehow acquired the taste of it, next thing which is going to fall on our heads is polymer (the kludge of comparable proportions). Brace yourselves!

Good that I'm going to retire soon: accepting Angular and friends as a career is going to kill any remaining professional self-respect even if one had some left.

The reason for this unfortunate development (as I see it) is a total lack of culture of professional criticism in programming. People who were supposed to speak out didn't do so.

[enraged_camel]

Funny you mention that. Just today I was doing some research about Angular, Ember, Backbone, etc. The fundamental question I was trying to address was, why would one need a client-side MVC framework in the first place? After reading several lengthy articles, as well as looking at some documentation, I just couldn't grasp it. They all seem... off.

[lohankin]

If something is called "framework", you can safely ignore it - it's clearly a pile of crap. If the thing is useful, it is called a library. As a corollary, if a language/programming paradigm requires frameworks to work, it's a failure right from the start. The problem is that when you throw away all frameworks, you are not employable any more. And maybe that's the solution: find profession where you won't waste your life fighting next fad (which is different every year).

[sosuke]

Try to imagine a larger project, an entire site running client side with just API end points on the server. Each framework you mentioned has a different approach, but they all try and tackle the task of organizing the heavy client side setup. If you did that project without those frameworks, you would end up writing most of a framework of your own.

[CmonDev]

You get a cute spinner animation instead of a blinking page. Thick client is coming back. Also JS developers are cheaper, although good ones are hard to find, because everyone likes server-side.