[emilis_info]

Guys, relax and stop whining. You are probably wrong about what is going to happen with Angular, because you underestimate how massive Angular has become.

I recently began searching for a new JavaScript job. I don't like Angular at all and I am skipping all positions that mention it. I have to skip ~90% of all ads. Think of it – 90% of companies that are expanding their web development use Angular.

So, even if this change will kill Angular, it will probably take years. It has become too big to fail.

If you like Angular, get excited about it. Look at how .NET or Java guys accept everything coming from Microsoft or Oracle. You are in a similar ship now. No one got fired for choosing Angular. No one will.

[colinramsay]

Is this right? I can't believe for a millisecond that 90% of all new JS jobs relate to Angular, it's a horrible and overblown framework with a high barrier to entry. Were you looking at a particular subset of jobs, a particular industry or in a particular location?

[Jgrubb]

> it's a horrible and overblown framework with a high barrier to entry

Listen, if I can figure it out and get lots and lots of work done with it, it's neither horrible nor overblown and the barrier of entry was there but I got over it. By all means, keep ignoring it, but drop the shtick where you know better than thousands and thousands of us out here building things with it.

[nawitus]

>if I can figure it out and get lots and lots of work done with it, it's neither horrible nor overblown

That's a weird argument. Just because you think it's not horrible or overblown doesn't really mean much. That's just an opinion.

I've worked full-time with AnguarJS over a year, and I know it pretty well. It's easily better than jQuery spaghetti code, and probably better than most data-binding frameworks. It has lots of issues, though. From bad documentation and performance to the mess of $scope.$apply/digest loop and a lot of moderate design problems.

Anyway, the biggest problem is the boat. AngularJS is really trying to "eat" other libraries and actually doesn't try to be modular. A data-binding/MVC framework shouldn't invent it's own module system, and recently it's own programming language. Apparently Google is trying to kill of jQuery too and substitute their own system. And they want to reinvent everything as AngularJS modules instead of "plain" JavaScript code that can be used across multiple frameworks.

What I'd like to see in AngularJS 2 is a tiny core which does data-binding without $scope.$apply, is fast and modular and could be used with a wide range of other frameworks. What I don't want to do is start writing AngularJS modules with AtScript and using their forced(?) ES6 classes.

[Bahamut]

Angular 2 definitely aims to be more modular - the Angular team acknowledges the problem that it isn't modular enough itself. Stuff like di.js, watchtower.js, zone.js, etc. are all built with modularity in mind & are framework agnostic. I think once Angular hits 2.0 and it becomes highly modular, we are going to see a boom in development productivity. Some of what is currently in Angular is unique for JavaScript, such as the change listener pattern and dependency injection. These are things that we'd like to take advantage of with other libraries. Combining stuff like di.js with React sounds very appetizing to me.

In addition, it would appear that we would be able to use these libraries with Node.js as well.

I can only see this being a good thing.

[Jgrubb]

> That's a weird argument. Just because you think it's not horrible or overblown doesn't really mean much. That's just an opinion.

A contrary opinion to the OP's opinion. Are you asking me "where's the data" (?), because this whole thread is opinions.

edit:

> It has lots of issues, though.

No argument here. Providing validation feedback on forms, for instance. I'm not arguing that it's perfect and that I'll never love again, but it has opened up my head this year and for that I'll go to the mat for it.

[colinramsay]

I'm not ignoring it, please don't put words in my mouth. If people want to use it then that's their choice, albeit one I find fairly baffling. Given the other replies to my comment it seems I'm not alone.

[kuni-toko-tachi]

Hey pal, drop the chip on your shoulder. Just because AngularJS has wide adoption doesn't change the fact that it is an extremely poorly designed framework. I also refuse to consider AngularJS jobs. Many developers have had to suffer through bad frameworks like GWT because of industry trends. Those bruises are not badges of honor. ReactJS is a framework that is clearly better designed. Why waste time learning and suffering through AngularJS absurdities when ReactJS exists?

[Jgrubb]

I don't have a chip on my shoulder. It just reminds me of that old comeback for people who are complaining about how terrible PHP is - "oh, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you over all the work I was getting done with it."

> Why waste time learning and suffering through AngularJS absurdities when ReactJS exists?

Because I'd have to suffer through learning and integrating Backbone or Flux in addition to React to accomplish what I could by learning just Angular. And then I'd have to hope that my choices remained compatible with each other through version updates. Anyway, I may find React to be a better designed lib when I get around to using it, but it's definitely not an apples to apples comparison when it's only attempting to tackle 1 of the pieces that Angular handles.

[mgkimsal]

... because jobs?

I'm in agreement with your point, but... if 'the market' wants angular... 'the market' is going to have a hell of a time dealing with a mess in a couple of years when many of the decision makers that mandated angular move on to something else and leave piles of mess behind for someone else to clean up.

[emilis_info]

There may not be moving on. Or it may take a very long time. Angular is that big already.

Previously there was no the framework for web frontend development (like Rails for Ruby). From now on you will need convincing reasons to use anything else, even if it is clearly better. Moving on to something else will be much harder.

[rimantas]

Is it big in production deployments or only in hiring managers wishes?

[Bahamut]

I don't think that problem is restricted to Angular - it's one that you see with when developers wrote unmodular code period. I saw it with legacy ExtJS code.

[mgkimsal]

Oh I completely agree it's not an angular thing. It was a Rails thing, is or will be a 'node' thing, etc. It will be a docker thing at some point too. There's a rush to 'new' that appears to everyone to be 'it', people use 'it' for a bit, realize it doesn't solve all problems, then move on to something else. They've done a lot of learning on someone's dime, moved on, but left a mess of code for someone else to 'maintain' for years. The cycle will continue to repeat itself for a long time...

[jacquesm]

> when many of the decision makers that mandated angular move on to something else and leave piles of mess behind for someone else to clean up.

That's already happening. Two contacts came up in the last two weeks with Angular projects gone off the rails (pun intended).

[gloverkcn]

I've been looking In the US for remote positions, contracts, and local. If they are using a framework theres 90% chance it's angular. For all javascript/html/Css type jobs its more like 50-60%. I've talked to consulting/contracting companies and they have agreed that they have far more requests angular than any other front end tech.

I agree with your comment about it. I tried it and didn't like it. I've talked to a few devs who Have mentioned issue in larger projects more around organizing the code base.).

Regardless of all of that. There's so much demand that I'm going to drop emberjs and learn angular.

[emilis_info]

Yes it is a horrible and overblown framework. However it has this "made by Google" sticker on it. No one got fired for choosing Google ;)

I haven't done the exact numbers and 90% seems really high, but it feels like it. I bet the exact number wouldn't be lower than 75%.

I live in Eastern Europe, but I am mostly looking for remote jobs. I am a real full-stack developer and would gladly work on backend with Node.js, but these jobs are even rarer these days.

[fungi]

> No one got fired for choosing Google ;)

Only a brave woman would build her house on GWT

[pavlov]

Angular is attractive to "strategic technologists" because it's rich in ceremony, edifice and nomenclature inspired by the European Union.

A platform like this achieves critical mass when it starts appearing in McKinsey slides, and then it will become a permanent fixture in job ads for the next 10 years. I guess Angular has reached that milestone.

[fetbaffe]

The enterprise folks have arrived to ruin everything. Run, just run!

[ycitm]

I've just been looking for JavaScript work in the UK. Certainly the majority (maybe not 90%, but definitely > 50%) of jobs mention Angular. It's difficult to tell how many of these are just "put something cool on the advert to attract the hipsters" and how many are actual "we use or will use angular heavily in production" though.

[bshimmin]

UK here too, and this sounds about right. I would say that most of these shops are not using Angular "heavily in production" right now - either they will have some portion of an existing project that they're trying to move to Angular or a greenfield project for which they're evaluating Angular and think anybody with that skill would be a valuable addition to the team, whether or not they end up using Angular.

In terms of roles I see posted on LinkedIn in the UK (which may or may not be representative of the industry as a whole, but it's all I've got to go on), there's a lot of Angular, a lot of "Angular or similar (eg. Backbone)", and a lot of "MVC (eg. Angular, Backbone)". Many of those same roles do also mention jQuery, but not with the same sort of billing it might have had two years ago. I'm not sure I've ever seen a role specifically mentioning Ember.

Like quite a few others in this thread, I'm an Angular naysayer for the standard reasons, and would generally prefer to avoid it, but the market does rather dictate what we end up doing sometimes, for better or for worse.

[Ronsenshi]

90% is certainly high. But he's not that far from the truth. A lot of companies do expect anyone working with JS to know Angular... which is not good for me. I'm really not a fan of that framework.

[cloverich]

> it's a horrible and overblown framework with a high barrier to entry.

I'm honestly surprised how often I keep hearing about its high barrier to entry. I've worked on ~5 different MVC style web frameworks, all server side, over ~5 years of professional programming. I just started a front-end position using Angular for the last three months, and have found it pretty straight-forward to pick up. That is, the concepts I learned server-side have translated fairly cleanly to the front-end.

Most of the people I've seen struggle with the framework so far are those that didn't have that server side experience. Which isn't to say its required, but only to say some of the concepts they struggle the most with are concepts you need for any MVC style web framework - server side or front-end. Its not that they are that similar, but that they encounter and solve many of the same problems. Routing, separation of concerns, dependency injection, testing, getting what you want into the template, etc. And Angular isn't what you'd call a micro framework (see Django vs Flask or Bottle from Python world, for example). So of course Angular is large; it tries to solve alot of problems for you (how well it does so is another story).

Anyways, the take-away (from my point of view) is that much of the work that used to be done by server-side guys can now be done by front-end guys. So they have to learn all the same concepts and struggle with all the same problems to be effective.