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I hate Angular with a passion. It's easily the most verbose, overly complex front end framework I've ever used which just takes the fun out of building web apps

I hate Angular with a passion. It's easily the most verbose, overly complex front end framework I've ever used which just takes the fun out of building web apps and make it a pure pain. I would rather work on a farm and shovel pig shit all day than work in Angular again. My last job forced Angular on me, I quit after a while (not because of solely that reason) but I told them Angular was a bad choice and they chose to overrule me. Pretty funny now, they will have to endure the pain of migrating a large app which makes me feel good. Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

approxim8ion 2y ago
To offer a differing experience, I've been working in Angular for a couple of years now and personally like it quite a bit. I don't like frontend frameworks in general, but given the choice I prefer Angular over React.
- Andrex 2y ago
  Angular was made for you, basically. I've always seen that as the use case. It never seemed suitable for mostly-frontend devs, but it's probably perfect for mostly-backend ones.
  - approxim8ion 2y ago
    Yeah, that makes sense I suppose. My Java background also means the verbosity and structure doesn't bother me much.
usui 2y ago
I seldom see this opinion but I'm glad to read it. People complain about JSX on the React side but what on Earth am I reading when I see the templating language that Angular came up with? ngIf, ngBlah. Much worse than JSX, which is subordinate to JavaScript code, not equal. I also have been forced to use Angular at the workplace and it killed any fun making web apps had. People say Angular is great for enterprise because it removes the burden of deciding things, but this indicates an organizational problem being solved technologically. In other words: Never a good thing. Similar conversation 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811256
- EMM_386 2y ago
  > the templating language that Angular came up with? ngIf, ngBlah The new templating syntax is simply @if () @else () ... it makes it much clearer to read in many cases. I never had a problem with *ngIf as long as you are controlling the visibility of one element. It became messy when you needed "else" statements in there.
- ecmascript 2y ago
  I didn't care so much about the syntax but rather the over reliance on the subscriber pattern that you have to have like a subscriber to even read something as fundamental as query params. And the funny thing is that is will fire once and then again when the query params is actually set. So you will have an empty fire for when they are not yet set for some strange reason, presumably from when the observer is created. The problem with Angular, especially as the app grows is that you will have many different subscribers that all listen on the same state changes, then fire them again so you will have code that just runs again and again and it's extremely hard to have a mental model on how the system work and what code runs when. The code also easily gets super slow because you run something, it affect state, then it triggers something else that triggers something else that just happen to affect the first state, whoops now you have a loop. Even if the loop resolves, it's pretty much inevitable to get a loop sometimes if the app is complex enough, at least in my experience working with several other devs.
  - tashoecraft 2y ago
    Sounds more like a misunderstanding of the framework and observables. The problem many faced with angular is they chose not to learn observables, then got angry. If you have different subscribers, all on the same state change, you may not have chosen to use ShareReplay, or filter, or bothered to use a tool like ngrx that has memoized selectors. The same problem you're complaining about is the same thing people in the react community are complaining about because they never bothered to understand useEffect, and now have massive cascading updates. There is a very good reason they chose to make everything a subscriber, and it helps avoid pitfalls, because it doesn't hide away the async nature of everything. Signals are just a simpler way to understand and use that same async nature.
EMM_386 2y ago
I've been working with large Angular projects for years and I really enjoy the development experience. Especially now with the new template syntax, signals, and other recent changes.
- tmjdev 2y ago
  Agreed. I think the earlier days of Angular put a bad taste in many people's mouths. Many people who complain about Angular being verbose seem to only have experience working on smaller apps.
mattlondon 2y ago
I suspect the migration effort will be fairly minimal. We recently migrated a bunch of stuff in a large codebase to use signals instead of observables and it was very straightforward. Couple of days for a junior engineer levels of straightforward. I personally find Angular to be fine - sure there is a learning curve but that is true of anything (it's not like you can just pickup modern react and make anything functional without having to know how react works and spend ages picking libraries and installing and learning how to use npm, spending 6 months in a sanatorium getting therapy after realising you have to use npm for react and accept the shit show dumpster fire you are letting yourself in for by relying on npm, and deciding if you should use hooks or not and what about JS vs TS etc etc ). I find JSX in React an uncomfortable compromise that throws out a bunch of hard-learnt best practice in computer science (mixing up and confusing presentation with business logic in the same file). Separation of concerns is a good thing. Angular will continue to be a solid choice for large professional outfits that care about things like maintainability, repeatable builds, dependency management, readability etc etc. Having Angular be the framework that powers websites like google.com and YouTube is just going to make it even more of a "no-brainer" choice than it already is if people are picking a web UI framework.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LispSporks22 2y ago
I’ve hated working on every Angular project I’ve worked on. No matter the team, the experience level or complexity, it’s always been an absolute misery. I cannot understand how it was invented/why it exists, how smart people at Google convinced themselves to use it. I cannot understand how they let it escape into the wild or even why those not forced to use it, choose it. I know I’ve begged before for this, and it’s pointless, but please if you’re in the position to, please consider snuffing it out and starting over.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  It's worse, everyone jumped from Angular to the React bandwagon. I use these types of things as litmus tests for if I want to join a new company/team. No sense in cussing under my breath all day every day. It's really hard to smile after you just invented a new vulgar phrase to describe mangled tech.
  - uxcolumbo 2y ago
    So React is equally bad in your view? If so why? What do you use?
- dezsiszabi 2y ago
  Why did you hate working on every Angular project?

approxim8ion 2y ago

To offer a differing experience, I've been working in Angular for a couple of years now and personally like it quite a bit. I don't like frontend frameworks in general, but given the choice I prefer Angular over React.

Andrex 2y ago
Angular was made for you, basically. I've always seen that as the use case. It never seemed suitable for mostly-frontend devs, but it's probably perfect for mostly-backend ones.
- approxim8ion 2y ago
  Yeah, that makes sense I suppose. My Java background also means the verbosity and structure doesn't bother me much.

usui 2y ago

I seldom see this opinion but I'm glad to read it. People complain about JSX on the React side but what on Earth am I reading when I see the templating language that Angular came up with? ngIf, ngBlah. Much worse than JSX, which is subordinate to JavaScript code, not equal. I also have been forced to use Angular at the workplace and it killed any fun making web apps had. People say Angular is great for enterprise because it removes the burden of deciding things, but this indicates an organizational problem being solved technologically. In other words: Never a good thing. Similar conversation 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811256

EMM_386 2y ago
> the templating language that Angular came up with? ngIf, ngBlah The new templating syntax is simply @if () @else () ... it makes it much clearer to read in many cases. I never had a problem with *ngIf as long as you are controlling the visibility of one element. It became messy when you needed "else" statements in there.
ecmascript 2y ago
I didn't care so much about the syntax but rather the over reliance on the subscriber pattern that you have to have like a subscriber to even read something as fundamental as query params. And the funny thing is that is will fire once and then again when the query params is actually set. So you will have an empty fire for when they are not yet set for some strange reason, presumably from when the observer is created. The problem with Angular, especially as the app grows is that you will have many different subscribers that all listen on the same state changes, then fire them again so you will have code that just runs again and again and it's extremely hard to have a mental model on how the system work and what code runs when. The code also easily gets super slow because you run something, it affect state, then it triggers something else that triggers something else that just happen to affect the first state, whoops now you have a loop. Even if the loop resolves, it's pretty much inevitable to get a loop sometimes if the app is complex enough, at least in my experience working with several other devs.
- tashoecraft 2y ago
  Sounds more like a misunderstanding of the framework and observables. The problem many faced with angular is they chose not to learn observables, then got angry. If you have different subscribers, all on the same state change, you may not have chosen to use ShareReplay, or filter, or bothered to use a tool like ngrx that has memoized selectors. The same problem you're complaining about is the same thing people in the react community are complaining about because they never bothered to understand useEffect, and now have massive cascading updates. There is a very good reason they chose to make everything a subscriber, and it helps avoid pitfalls, because it doesn't hide away the async nature of everything. Signals are just a simpler way to understand and use that same async nature.

EMM_386 2y ago

I've been working with large Angular projects for years and I really enjoy the development experience. Especially now with the new template syntax, signals, and other recent changes.

tmjdev 2y ago
Agreed. I think the earlier days of Angular put a bad taste in many people's mouths. Many people who complain about Angular being verbose seem to only have experience working on smaller apps.

mattlondon 2y ago

I suspect the migration effort will be fairly minimal. We recently migrated a bunch of stuff in a large codebase to use signals instead of observables and it was very straightforward. Couple of days for a junior engineer levels of straightforward. I personally find Angular to be fine - sure there is a learning curve but that is true of anything (it's not like you can just pickup modern react and make anything functional without having to know how react works and spend ages picking libraries and installing and learning how to use npm, spending 6 months in a sanatorium getting therapy after realising you have to use npm for react and accept the shit show dumpster fire you are letting yourself in for by relying on npm, and deciding if you should use hooks or not and what about JS vs TS etc etc ). I find JSX in React an uncomfortable compromise that throws out a bunch of hard-learnt best practice in computer science (mixing up and confusing presentation with business logic in the same file). Separation of concerns is a good thing. Angular will continue to be a solid choice for large professional outfits that care about things like maintainability, repeatable builds, dependency management, readability etc etc. Having Angular be the framework that powers websites like google.com and YouTube is just going to make it even more of a "no-brainer" choice than it already is if people are picking a web UI framework.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

LispSporks22 2y ago

I’ve hated working on every Angular project I’ve worked on. No matter the team, the experience level or complexity, it’s always been an absolute misery. I cannot understand how it was invented/why it exists, how smart people at Google convinced themselves to use it. I cannot understand how they let it escape into the wild or even why those not forced to use it, choose it. I know I’ve begged before for this, and it’s pointless, but please if you’re in the position to, please consider snuffing it out and starting over.

datavirtue 2y ago
It's worse, everyone jumped from Angular to the React bandwagon. I use these types of things as litmus tests for if I want to join a new company/team. No sense in cussing under my breath all day every day. It's really hard to smile after you just invented a new vulgar phrase to describe mangled tech.
- uxcolumbo 2y ago
  So React is equally bad in your view? If so why? What do you use?
dezsiszabi 2y ago
Why did you hate working on every Angular project?