Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

https://javascriptkicks.com/stories/3718

by senoff • 11 years ago

114 135 11 years ago

Apologies to those of you who might be having trouble viewing this on mobile - it's high up on the list to fix in the coming days

warfangle• 11 years ago

So... Are they learning bad habits like serving 500 errors to mobile devices? ;)

jasonwocky• 11 years ago

Hah! Shows what you know. I've got a 500 on my laptop, too ;)

coldcode• 11 years ago

Can't view it on Safari/Mac either, also 500 error.

robertthegrey4• 11 years ago

There was a lot of commentary on my first post https://javascriptkicks.com/stories/2657 about not detailing enough why I think Angular isn't good for junior programmers asking for more detail. Here it is.

One of the big motivators for this follow-up post is due the the cries of FUD. Of course it's just my opinion, but I like to back my opinion up with facts if possible and it seems there were some questions cropping up around how much of a problem it geniunly is versus me just having a whine about it.

In all fairness I'm excited about Angular 2.0, but it's just too far off to quantify its use just yet. So it's not that I'm anti-Angular, I'm just anti-Crap, and there is a lot of that in the first incarnation I'm afraid, and it's biting too hard to ignore.

I hope my next post will be a lot more cheerful :)

colund2• 11 years ago

The page is not loading properly for me (on a Windows laptop with Chrome). When I use the given link I get "500 - InternalServerError Something went horribly, horribly wrong while servicing your request. We're sorry :-(" and when I go via javascriptkicks.com it keeps loading and never completes.

ishansharma• 11 years ago

Same here. Windows 8.1, Firefox 35.

ceeK• 11 years ago

I somewhat assumed that the 500 error was evidence of the post's title, heh.

sfjailbird• 11 years ago

Seriously. Why do you need to run a shitload of JavaScript just to display a damn article.

lohengramm• 11 years ago

Thought the same thing for the fun.

V-2• 11 years ago

It's not the browser, it's a server error.

igl• 11 years ago

Refreshing the page worked for me.

tragic3• 11 years ago

After I turned off µBlock, it loaded alright(Chrome/OSX 10.8). I know a lot of people here love them an adblocker, so that might be the problem. It seems to be blocking a JSONP call somewhere, and thus the loader spins forever...

LoneWolf• 11 years ago

Using µBlock and loading

gorhill• 11 years ago

Only `google-analytics.com` is blocked when using default filter lists. The 500 error appears to be random, I got it both with and without uBlock.

username223• 11 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/VibuzuV.png

Cool page, bro. I guess you don't really want people to read it.

SideburnsOfDoom• 11 years ago

Very distinctive error page; graphics by Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), as produced by nancyfx ( http://nancyfx.org/ ).

city412• 11 years ago

I can't get it to load in Chrome (500 error), but it will load in Firefox.

delluminatus2• 11 years ago

Ironically, it works if you disable Javascript.

edit: seems to be working anyway.

kuni-toko-tachi• 11 years ago

The central problem with Angular is what is says about the software industry in general - that a framework so fundamentally and ridiculously flawed could invite such wide appeal suggests that many people have absolutely no idea what they are doing. The thousand monkeys approach to engineering has wide implications for security and safety of systems that we rely on. There is simply no way that you can say that you know Javascript and at the same time support Angular. None.

cozuya2• 11 years ago

Thats a little hyperbole. I "support" it in that its an easy way for someone to make a typical web application without having to know the details of call vs apply, arguments, prototypes, etc, or writing a lot of boilerplate. So in that way I guess angular is for people who don't want to learn "javascript" - and thats what you see it being used for generally anyways.

snarfy2• 11 years ago

And how do those developers deal with issues such as XSS, injection, untrusted JSON, etc if they don't know JavaScript? I agree with the OP. At some point it will come back to bite you.

I've watched many ASP and ASP.NET developers struggle with more modern web methodologies such as restful web apis, client side MVC, etc and it's because they never took the time to understand the web, the browser, or javascript and let ASP take care of it for them since everything is server side and postbacks.

I fear it will be the same mistake again but made with frameworks such as angular where we have a generation of developers who have no idea how the underlying technology works.

lstamour• 11 years ago

I liked Angular because it seemed to have a lot of the same ideas that polymer and other libraries had, but supported older browsers also. It seemed more pragmatic.

It is a bit annoying though that there's so much misinformation on the web. About the only source I trust right now is http://shop.oreilly.com/product/mobile/0636920033486.do

CmonDev3• 11 years ago

Settling for JS in the first place says something about the software industry in general. Let alone any MVC frameworks-of-day.

dasil003• 11 years ago

You say that as if there is some volition involved in the "settling" on JS. But there is no cohesive group with the agency to do any such thing. It's like blaming human evolution on individual human choices throughout history.

snarfy2• 11 years ago

If that were true there would be no such things as CoffeeScript and TypeScript. The market settled on JavaScript, not the software industry. The software industry is doing what it can with the hand the market dealt them. It's not like x86 is an awesome architecture, but here we are.

laichzeit0• 11 years ago

But what does it say exactly? That people prefer C-like syntax as opposed to anything else? That "done is better than perfect" when it comes to releasing a new language? That Netscape got it "wrong" in the 90's by including Javascript in their browser? I'm not quite sure what you're implying here.

kyberias• 11 years ago

This is a rather surprisingly and unnecessary harsh comment. Would you like to explain why do you think Angular is so flawed?

JanezStupar6• 11 years ago

For one, it is incompatible with the whole open web stack. You cannot use Bootstrap with it. And if you decide to move off Angular, you are going to be in a world of pain.

Second and worst of all - it is a monolithic framework. As long as you just do things the "Angular Way" - you are fine. If you want to change or override something, you are in a world of pain.

If you are learning Angular - you are hardly learning JavaScript. The knowledge learned from it is hardly transferable to the next framework down the line.

To me it looks a lot like SOAP. Everybody is acting like they understand what is going on. But nobody really does.

xtrumanx• 11 years ago

It is an unnecessarily harsh comment and I wouldn't have dignified it with a request for further clarification.

I'm also confused how something like that is a top comment on HN and makes me wonder what is so different about me and the everybody else who felt the need to upvote that comment.

Makes me think back about that dev Klabnik made cry after making fun their open source project. I can't get over that last sentence of kuni-toko-tachi's comment.

There is simply no way that you can say that you know Javascript and at the same time support Angular. None.

How does someone say something like that and not feel like an asshole afterwards.

jayvanguard• 11 years ago

It is necessarily harsh. The industry goes in these cycles with monolithic frameworks. Each time they end up collapsing under their own weight and each time a new generation goes and builds another piece of bloatware that catches on and away we go again...

xyzzy123• 11 years ago

Angular brutally sucks in a variety of ways, but security isn't one of them [pentester].

Specifically, the builtin "stuff" makes it actively hard to XSS, and in SPAs that's job #1.

angersock• 11 years ago

So, all all seriousness, what is the actual danger of XSS? Where does that typically come in?

Is it an issue on an intranet app with a controlled stack?

engendered2• 11 years ago

I have yet to see an Angular project that doesn't qualify as tiny. For that purpose -- banging out some internal CRUDish app -- if it allows people to create working success, then it's a success. Instead people are busy arguing over the semantics of over-engineering a couple of text boxes, and that really is what leaves me boggling. Though of course, as is the nature of these things, there are over-dramatizing camps, and one month Angular is the greatest thing ever on HN, the next it's the demonstration of all that is wrong in the world. The reality, as always, is somewhere in between.

It wasn't that many years ago when people didn't even understand basic concepts like closures in JavaScript, or the power they bring. Now people are viciously arguing about the edges. It's all very surreal.

There is simply no way that you can say that you know Javascript and at the same time support Angular.

One of the most common features pushed by just about every framework (just saw it about React yesterday) is desperately, and leakily, trying to abstract Javascript into some sort of classic OOP language. Some of the most popular tools allow you to write in various compiled-to-JavaScript languages (TypeScript, CoffeeScript, GWT, etc). It's all very strange. But again, if JavaScript is treated just as a runtime, and if it works for a team, there is some measure of success.

Swizec• 11 years ago

trying to abstract Javascript into some sort of classic OOP language

Which is wrong. And, I think, stems from the way CS is taught. Everyone starts with Java and learns that programming is all about knowing that a dog and a cat are just subclasses of the 4-legged-creature class, which is itself inherited from the mammal class. Wait no, that's not right now is it?

But it's how people learn.

JavaScript is a beautiful glorious language when you realise it's a weird hybrid between functional and OOP and is messy enough to let you do just about anything. It reminds me a lot of what I hear about Scala ...

dmak4• 11 years ago

The worst part about abstracting JS to classical inheritance (ex, CoffeeScript classes) is that the concepts do not match 1 to 1. If you try to create class variables, you will quickly run into closure issues which are clearly obvious in the compiled JavaScript.

JavaScript uses prototype inheritance and can fake classical inheritance, but it has its limitations.

danabramov2• 11 years ago

One of the most common features pushed by just about every framework (just saw it about React yesterday) is desperately, and leakily, trying to abstract Javascript into some sort of classic OOP language.

You missed the point of yesterday's React announcement.

It's not at all about OOP.

See this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959691

https://twitter.com/swannodette/status/560554408782864384

looins• 11 years ago

So when you see everyone flock to a framework you deem poorly implemented, the solution to the dissonance is to call everyone stupid, instead of admitting maybe there's some angle you're missing?

I've been doing JS since Netscape and Angular since before Google. I support Angular. Guess I don't know anything about JavaScript though. Nothing.

mrits• 11 years ago

"There is simply no way that you can say that you know Javascript and at the same time support Angular. None."

These kind of statements always make me think the author is trying to be dramatic because they don't know enough about the subject to try to get their strong feelings across in any other way.

datashovel• 11 years ago

I think what alot of people don't think about is that "proper / correct engineering principles" don't necessarily translate to creating successful projects / companies.

If your goal is to nitpick about the reasons why a specific framework is not right for the job, then "mission accomplished".

If your goal is to create amazing products / services. And are willing to do anything to accomplish that, then sadly I think you're on the wrong side of the argument.

fixermark7• 11 years ago

Essentially this.

Angular may be monolithic and less flexible, but if a young company gets to prototype faster with it and as a result survives to second- and third- funding rounds, they can afford the engineering hours to re-implement their UI from scratch.

Success (and its associated revenue) solves all engineering problems in the long run.

yummybear2• 11 years ago

(sorry if this comes off a bit snarky)

"Overuse of the eventing system ($watch, $emit, $broadcast) leading to performance problems and memory leaks and not realizing it or being able to debug it"

Blindly overusing most features in frameworks or libraries can cause performance problems. Which memory leaks?

"Writing Controllers and Directives that take dependencies which make them nearly impossible to test."

Doesn't dependencies in general make any code harder to test?

"Views that are heavily dosed with logic - but more on that later"

I certainly don't feel my views are dosed with logic? Which kind of 'logic' are you referring to here? Is there something preventing you from moving your logic outside of the view?

"Their first experience of DI is quite often that in Angular and it's horribly broken. Since the "patch" which fixed the minification issues, it's still really just a square peg in a round hole with woeful support for scope and lifetime and features which most DI gives you for free such as child containers. They end up hating DI and shy away from it on other projects."

This seems like wild speculation here, as well as not being very specific (how is it broken?). I'm sure DI in Angular could have been done in a more elegant way (I have no idea how), but I don't seem to run into any problems.

"Strange bugs that (when called over) have us all scratching our heads until one of use realizes - oh yeah, sorry we forgot to mention that pretty much everything passed around is global, and Directives etc. aren't namespaced, so I see what's happened - you've got a naming collision there"

Not sure what to respond here - you had a bug in your code and discovered it was due to naming collision. Do you run into this daily? I've run into 'strange bugs' or at least hard-to-diagnose bugs in almost every framework or library I've used.

None of these issues seem especially unique to Angular. I'm not saying Angular is a perfect framework, but my own experience have been mostly pleasant, and I don't feel that there is anything in particular in Angular vs. other frameworks or libraries that encourage bad behavior - juniors or seniors.

eyko• 11 years ago

"Blindly overusing most features in frameworks or libraries can cause performance problems. Which memory leaks?"

Binding to event emitted by an object on another object, then deleting the receiver, can cause a memory leak if you don't unbind first.

yummybear2• 11 years ago

True, but hardly unique to Angular.

rubicon33• 11 years ago

iOS has the exact same situation for it's notifications framework (essentially, observer pattern).

From what I've seen, consistently across frameworks that support the pattern, that you need to de-register your listener before releasing it from memory.

Pretty funny to think, I'm a "junior" developer and even I know that you have great power, but also responsibility, in the observer pattern.

fixermark7• 11 years ago

I can't disagree more with the author's assessment of Angular's dependency injection.

DI in Angular was the first time DI made sense to me. And it makes testing really staightforward: test the component you're on top of, mock and fake the rest. Lots of boilerplate, but no actual hassle.

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

Is there a way to open this full-screen? I find the pop very distracting.

robertthegrey4• 11 years ago

yes I'm working on that this weekend - also in an effort to fix the mobile issues. Full posts will display on the page on their own instead of the side bar like link stories appear

davexunit• 11 years ago

I wish I could go back in time and strongly oppose AngularJS at the last place I worked. Knowing what I know now, it was such a bad idea. I also made the mistake of adding it to a resume, too, so I have gotten too many recruiter emails about AngularJS jobs.

AngularJS has an amazing success/failure story. The developers have managed to get their technology used by so many web development teams whilst being extremely over-engineered and having a very steep learning curve. Why did so many of us get enamored with it in the first place? The power of Google?

woah• 11 years ago

The overengineering actually led to success, as it resulted in a batch of non-JS devs thinking that they had discovered some secret magic. They went on to write a bunch of blog posts, which made people think it was good.

fixermark7• 11 years ago

Enabling non-JS devs to create a rich experience website (even if it has performance and future-proofing flexibility issues) is secret magic. Never underestimate the number of non-web engineers who desperately want to make browser-accessible frontends to their tools without having to learn the "hell" that is Javscript.

I strongly suspect people were writing those blog posts because Angular worked for them in a way that alternatives had not; I hear that's how things get popular sometimes.

Svenstaro• 11 years ago

I agree with you on so many very painful levels. :/

tragic3• 11 years ago

I don't think it does have a steep learning curve, really. I first tried it when I was a real greenhorn, having played around with backbone and ember and not really enjoyed the experience; with Angular you can be doing something cool in about 10 minutes.

The weird terminology almost helps, especially if you're coming from a server-framework background where your Ms, Vs and Cs are pretty different (due to the difference between request/response and UI design) from the same terms in a client-side framework. I am not going to confuse $scope with an ActiveRecord model. Most of it, in any case, works a bit like this (or did for me when I was very junior) - 'if it has a dollar in front of it, it does Magic Stuff with little or no human intervention.

No, the learning curve is very flat - until, as the OP says, you hit a brick wall.

All that said, IME it is possible to properly organise code in an Angular app, get logic out of views and so on. But it is dependent on you knowing a bit about application design. The easy option is to turn scope into a god object and have a 500 line spaghetti controller.

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

I have the same feeling, except there was actually no debating it. Everyone used the phrase that Angular is the future of web development, even the back-end .NET people who only play with JS when the fancy strikes. Even the product people.

I didn't even try to mount a serious inquiry or evaluation - it was like an opinion steamroller. I really hated that feeling, but I was actually okay with the choice at the time because I wanted to learn Angular. I just remember being spooked by the total consensus that it was what we would use.

mcmillion• 11 years ago

It's like Kinja, but somehow worse.

milankragujevic2• 11 years ago

If anybody is having issues loading the page, here's a really long screenshot of the text... http://milankragujevic.com/uploads/2015-01-29_151409.jpg

Matheo05• 11 years ago

Sorry but I got an "Error 1011, access denied"

milankragujevic2• 11 years ago

Fixed it. Probably.

istorical• 11 years ago

It seems like what junior Angular devs really need is a post showing examples of both what NOT to do and also what to do INSTEAD.

I think the difficulty of Angular is largely you have so many tools available but it's hard for a junior developer (like myself) to recognise when each should be used.

thecolorblue• 11 years ago

I agree, and this article does not really help. I feel that part of calling yourself a senior developer is teaching junior developers how to write great software.

robertthegrey4• 11 years ago

As I said in the post, you just need to google for it. Here's one I found that helps you with $scope: http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2014/11/the-top-5-mis...

guiomie• 11 years ago

Anyone has an exemple on how to use the $scope properly ...? He only shows the wrong way of using it, but has no code for the right way.

colund2• 11 years ago

Yeah I personally think the page has shown bad habits much worse than Angular. I think AngularJS makes it REALLY easy to make SPA applications with data binding. I find it ironic that they bash AngularJS while their own site has (had) sever loading issues.

Don't blame the tool blame the fool :).

staticelf• 11 years ago

Interesting, the title tells something about bad habits but as soon as I try to visit it I just get a "loading" message that never seems to complete. If something is a bad habit, that's how it looks like.

jere• 11 years ago

Many would not even see the problem here, and just as children don't know cars can hurt, juniors don't know just how destructive this anti-pattern can be to performance, separation of concerns and long term code base maintenance.

Yup, I don't get it. I guess not only am I eternally doomed to be a junior dev but also am being compared to a child, a monkey typing at a typewriter, but also someone who doesn't know JS at all. Feels good man.

Other than some horribly obtuse undefined checking, there's no explanation of what the problem is. The argument seems to be that the controller depends on $scope. I... I thought that was the point. From the first line of documentation on controllers:

In Angular, a Controller is a JavaScript constructor function that is used to augment the Angular Scope.

If the idea is that this is a bad habit to bring elsewhere, fine. Some more explanation would be nice, but whatever. But the implication is that this is a trap within the context of Angular dev itself.

cejast• 11 years ago

agreed, some explanation on what's actually wrong here would be nice

poxrud2• 11 years ago

One thing that definitely can be improved is using "Controller As" syntax. It solves most of the $scope issues.

Here's a good writeup: http://toddmotto.com/digging-into-angulars-controller-as-syn...

bphogan• 11 years ago

This article only did one thing for me - demonstrate that the author himself doesn't understand Angular or the problems. I don't know Angular that well myself, but the author knew anything more than I did, he'd be able to spend the extra 30 seconds to write the refactored code.

Dismiss this article. It's a waste of time and energy. In fact, I really shouldn't even be wasting my time commenting on it.

crdoconnor3• 11 years ago

This article only did one thing for me - demonstrate that the author himself doesn't understand Angular or the problems.

Seems pretty evident from the horrible jankiness of this blog. Heavy as shit and it loads on the 5th try.

delluminatus2• 11 years ago

The thing that struck me about it was that the $scope.displayName() function shadows itself by setting $scope.displayName again:

        $scope.displayName = function () {
            if ($scope.anonymous()) {
                return;
            }
            $scope.displayName = $scope.name;
        };

I have no idea how that's related to Angular, though. It looks like it's just bad programming practice.

dmak4• 11 years ago

I agree completely. You wouldn't do this any ANY language let alone Angular. However, I get he is trying to make a point that junior developers are using the $scope too trivially therefore causing slow performances, but this can be easily overcome by just incorporating better conventions into your codebase.

poxrud2• 11 years ago

Yes not to mention that displayName() will crash next time it will get called.

mcv• 11 years ago

Well, there's a good reason why $scope and controllers will disappear with Angular 2.0. $scope is convenient, but also a massive source of problems. There's workarounds for those problems, but those workarounds wouldn't even be necessary if this aspect of Angular had been designed better.

Angular has some great stuff, and some really necessary ideas and principles that were sorely needed in Javascript. I love working with it, most of the time. But it also has some serious design errors.

Bahamut• 11 years ago

I think anyone who knows Angular well would agree - it's a joy to work with, but it isn't perfect. Angular 2.0 is a step in the right direction in many ways.

This blog post is pretty horrid though.

I find myself moving more of my code into pure JS & borrowing concepts from languages like Java (interfaces, abstract classes, etc.) to increase agility in the event I want to move towards using a different library/framework. I gave a talk related to this idea of a frontend SOA about a week ago - here are the slides: http://slides.com/wesleycho/soa-angular

tericho• 11 years ago

This is anecdotal, but I once found this incredible use of $scope while viewing the source for a sports page: https://gist.github.com/tcrosen/96279e39f9b0fb85c266

logn• 11 years ago

I don't know Angular at all. But it appears that the example with $scope is not respecting the MVC design pattern. It's all been flattened and merged. The controller should only update the model. And the view should only get state from the model. In the example, the controller wraps the model and presents itself to the view as the model and controller. So now to write a test of the view, you can't just create some dummy model, you have to create a mocked up controller.

bmm6o2• 11 years ago

Totally. I like Angular a lot, and I'm not blind to its drawbacks. The code sample in the blog post has room for improvement, but I don't understand what he thinks it demonstrates. Yeah, it's a little weird that controllers don't expose their own functions, that instead you attach functions and data to the $scope. But if that's the way you do it Angular, I don't understand what makes it a bad habit to learn.

bmm6o2• 11 years ago

He's added a link in the comments to http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2014/11/the-top-5-mis..., which makes a strong argument. It's too bad he couldn't articulate this in his post.

v512• 11 years ago

seriously, the website design sucks.

MiddleEndian• 11 years ago

Agreed. If you click out of the weird popup the article is in, you get a list of articles. If you click on one of those articles, a new window/tab opens in your browser, with a similar setup (article in weird popup), and if you click to the left of that, now you have two windows/tabs with lists of articles.

I almost wonder if it was made like that as a joke.

cpursley• 11 years ago

In other news "How junior developer was able to quickly ship their first SPA using Angular, satisfy client requirements and get paid."

wnevets• 11 years ago

Why junior developers are learning bad habits from <insert anything here>.

moron4hire• 11 years ago

the second camp, those that said I was just spouting FUD because I didn't explain myself in detail, which surprised me a bit because those are developers who presumably have been working on Angular and in my opinion should already know about the pitfalls and their effect on juniors.

I have come to learn that the majority of people who say they work in a particular system have actually only ever dabbled in it.

rdtsc• 11 years ago

I am not a web developer but I have been trying to keep up with the technology.

I tried learning Angular because people at work started using and hyping it beyond measure. So I thought 'ok' this got to be really good stuff.

And it was good, _if_ experienced people held my hand. Otherwise I got lost in a soup of what seemed like unnecessary terminology -- $scopes, controllers, digest cycles, dependency injections, directives, and so on.

It kind of brought back memories of first generations of Enterprise Java frameworks (you know the factoryfactorymanager joke...)

So I have seen Angular work easily for already experienced devs who knew web front-end development very well. For me, what I really like is React. Ever since watching Peter Hunt's video one or two years ago, the idea of the virtual DOM and how events propagate made sense and was small enough to fit in my brain. I was able to go through some tutorial and do a few toy project in my spare time.

Anyway, if you care for another data point, there it is.

fixermark7• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, that issue isn't limited to angular: it falls under the general category of "If you haven't gotten burned by the problems a pattern is trying to solve, a pattern looks like unnecessary complexity." I'm reminded of when I had to learn COM back in the day; as a developer who had cut their teeth on programming on Macintosh followed by Debian, it seemed like needless complexity until I grasped the zen of the problem it tried to solve: providing a common protocol for different binaries compiled by different C++ compilers to share data structures and do inter-process communication in an object-oriented fashion without sharing source code. COM seemed way too complex to me because (a) in the Mac world, there was only one compiler that mattered (at least by the time I got into it), so binary incompatibility was essentially a non-issue, and (b) in the Linux world, if you needed two modules to inter-operate, you could meld their source code together.

Similarly, if you haven't tried for 100% test coverage, dependency injection seems needlessly complicated, and if you haven't had to nest dozens of HTML templates written by different developers using different patterns, directives seem way over-engineered.

ep1032• 11 years ago

I strongly disagree. The idea of a directive isn't unnecessarily complex because it isn't needed. And yes, there should be a pattern to force their use, for exactly the reasons you specified.

The claim that's being lobbied against Angular, however, is that they were schizophrenic in their choice of implementations for all of their patterns, or to state it another way, that the same advantages could have been gained with much, much simpler patterns. Instead of building a nice clean framework, they built an auto-magical framework, and declared you must learn every workaround in the "Angular Way" to use it.

There are plenty of js frameworks now, many of which have analogous components to directives and controllers and views, etc. But while most, if not all of them, allow for the same advantages you've mentioned, few of them do so in such a complicated, boilerplate, and arbitrary manner.

And this is scary, because it looks like they're continuing this trend with a completely new "Angular 2.0 Way".

I'm going to go off the deep end here for a moment, but, back when I was in college, I took some marketing class where they discussed in depth the idea of user interface as a method of product lockin. The idea was if you built a product simple enough, but then obfuscated the correct method of usage correctly, you could make a product that was simple enough that new comers would be drawn to your product, but complicated enough that it would take so much time to master, that most who did so would actively desire never to leave as they were now the local experts. SharePoint really is a poster-child for this sort of dark design. And I think of this every single time I use angular, not because the ideas are wrong, but because of what simple things were implemented in a complicated manner, and what others were made auto-magical.

ep1032• 11 years ago

which, I think, was the entire point of this article. But it speaks a lot to the angular community, and the heavy hand Google has used to build and maintain it, that the top half of the comments on this page center around people intentionally not seeing this

fixermark7• 11 years ago

I don't think I can agree with that assessment. Alternatively, is the top half of the comments saying "Angular is complicated, but not unnecessarily so for building large web apps with big teams?"

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

I'm an experienced front-end developer and I spent some months working on an Angular app. My experience was much like yours - way too many concepts to contend with and an overall "enterprisey" feel. I also think the dirty-checking and digest cycle was a pretty serious mistake.

city412• 11 years ago

I find it interesting that most negative Angular articles are so vague. Why is it so tough to articulate what is wrong with Angular? I agree Angular is not the best, but I don't have such strong negative feelings for it. I've used it successfully in the past and as long as you keep things simple and don't go overboard with all that it offers, you can create a decent website with it.

treerunner• 11 years ago

Hmm. I think I'll check out what my boss blogged about today..

yoanizer• 11 years ago

I see a lot of hate, but I can't see the arguments.

MrDosu• 11 years ago

MVVM has been around for years and years. It's just newish to the JS scene.

It is painful to read articles like this where even the author misunderstands the pattern and failed to read some of the standard literature on the topic. Just because MVVM is hip now does not mean everyone needs to reinvent wheels.

lcfcjs• 11 years ago

Fix the site! this sounds interesting

simlevesque• 11 years ago

The mobile site it is totally broken

batoure• 11 years ago

those that said I was just spouting FUD

I was not part of the crowd that made this comment at the outset of the first article but I would say that the second article only confirms the suspicions of these readers.

Identifying a treacherous design pattern is one thing. To say that a particular pattern says one thing or another about the skill or scale of a particular developer is another. Especially in the land of Javascript frameworks where the flexibility to do and incorporate anything can be a serious poison pill.

I have worked on and lead two teams that implemented angular projects, on the first we moved into it as a group of relatively experienced developers. In the second we on-boarded a number of junior developers. My experience with the junior developers was that they took their queues pretty quickly from the work of the senior developers.

In particular I have never seen this particular pattern in our code. I have found that the tendency to want to break the angular paradigm with outside JavaScript or angular library injection overkill are much more common practices that we end up needing to spend time quashing.

alblue• 11 years ago

The blog rambles and disables native scrolling. It's not worth your time reading it.

cheshire137• 11 years ago

I wish he had clarified what was wrong with stuff. This article wasn't helpful for me at all.

Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular

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