I have recently taken over an Angular project (with a C# backend, thankfully) at my job. It took two hours to get it to even compile correctly because some dependencies were apparently outdated in package.json and it just ran on the other dev's machine by accident. I don't understand why I need over 100 dependencies for a simple Angular Single Page App that pulls JSON from the backend and pushes JSON back. Meanwhile, the C# backend (a huge, complicated behemoth of software) ran on the first click.
Three developers on my team spent the last 4 years pushing for angular. Four years ago, I was 50/50 on it vs react, so whatever, but if my team's really for it, let's do it.
Fast forward to angular 2, and we're down to two developers who are still for it.
Fast forward to today, I'm down to one angular dev who's still for it, and two of the original three have left for react jobs. Meanwhile, I'm left with a bunch of angular 1 code that needs to be upgraded to angular 2, and a few testing-out-angular-2 projects that are dependency hell.
The only reason I ultimately embraced angular 1 to begin with (above reasons aside), was because it was so opinionated about everything, I could throw it at my weaker developers and say: "just learn the angular way to do it", and there was very little left they could meaningfully screw up. Angular proponents on the team would see it as a point of expertise to teach the "angular way" to more junior devs, and everyone left the day feeling good.
When it comes to Javascript 95% difficulty with writing good maintainable code is ensuring that your team is all writing to a very exact, and consistent quality and style, since there are so many different ways you can write js, and so many potential pitfalls. And if the team all wants to embrace Google's Angular standard, that works for me. Its far easier to be able to point to an ecosystem with an explicit, opinionated way of writing code, than it is to continuously train people on how to write maintainable code otherwise.
But with angular 2, if you haven't been drinking to cool-aid for a while now, it requires so much knowledge just to get running, I can't even have junior devs work on it, without a senior dev who's also an angular fanboy there to make sure everything is set up to begin with. Its absurd. And I'm supposed to sell to the business that we need to migrate all my Angular 1 code to this monstrosity? And then spend time again every 6 months making the necessary upgrades to stay up to date? Get real.
I don't understand. We've started a new Angular 2+ project and our junior developers managed to roll into quite easily. Our designers (who know jack about Javascript) got excited when they discovered that our project uses .scss and the results have been spectacular.
Seriously, I REALLY REALLY don't get this hate for Angular 2+
Just wait until Angular 2 hasn't been cool for a while and you can't find any JS developers who are interested in maintaining your software rather than rewriting it in xyz_latest_fad_framework.
Kidding - but we had exactly the same problem, except with a React app rather than an Angular one just before Christmas.
No joke on with this statement though: every time we have a time-consuming build issue to deal with it comes down to some npm dependency problem. Honestly, if there were a way we could realistically ditch npm (NO! YARN IS NOT ANY BETTER - to preempt that suggestion - it's simply an npm-a-like) I'd happily do so but sadly there isn't.
The basic explanation is that the dependencies for the angular app are much smaller, but I’m not sure which bit is confusing you. You don’t understand why an incorrectly written program required work to run when a bigger but correctly written program was easy?
In principle programs shouldn't stop working just because they are old.
Yes, no language completely realize this. But there's a world of difference between C's "it was written only 40 years ago, why did compilers break it?" to Python's "yes, you are expected to review your code every 3 or 4 years", and there is another world of difference to the faster Javascript frameworks that practice "your code is 6 weeks too old, your looser!"
This is a cultural thing, where developers will decide when to invest in developing their library against the old version and when for the new version. For stable languages like C, or distro supported packages it’s years - just check out Debian or Red Hat for an ecosystem that values stability.
