

Angular 2.0 Website - hswolff
https://angular.io/

======
grumblestumble
This is a bit of a rant, but anyway...

There are currently two posts on Angular on the front page of HN. Both have
quickly devolved into multiple rants decrying "breaking changes", which can be
traced back to the initial Angular 2.0 announcement:
[http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2014/10/ng-europe-
angular-13-a...](http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2014/10/ng-europe-
angular-13-and-beyond.html)

This really speaks to the importance of communication around these
announcements. If you pay attention to what's actually communicated, yes,
there will be a migration plan for 1.x apps. Yes, 1.x will be continued to be
supported for much longer than the lifetime of most of your little startups -
sorry to break it to you. Yes, 2.x is a much-needed step forward for SPA app
development. BUT, when Angular 2 was announced, it was announced too early -
they shared the fact that breaking changes were coming, and that AT THAT TIME,
there wasn't a plan in place for migrating 1.x apps. That poorly phrased
communication has since dominated any discussion about Angular 2, very much to
the detriment of the project. It's the same thing as the Flickr, Instagram,
Facebook, etc TOU changes that caused such a brouhaha in recent years, except
that you would think technically-minded developers would be able to parse the
actual information.

~~~
sergiotapia
I understand where you're coming from - but that singular announcement left a
TERRIBLE taste in my mouth for Angular. I won't use it for any project, hobby
or otherwise.

Compare it to Ember where they are bending over backwards to provide free
improvements and a sane backwards compatible approach.

Why bet your entire business on a framework that has such poor communication
skills? (Again: Assuming what you're saying is correct ;) )

~~~
grumblestumble
Yeah, very valid point. Ember's outward communications are a really good model
of how to deal with this stuff - unfortunately I just can't imagine myself
working with the framework. The thing I find most hilarious is that the
followup to the "OMG Angular 2.0 is making breaking changes" herdthink is
usually "Let's all move to React 0.12!".

------
martingordon
> Angular 2 is currently in Alpha Preview. We recommend using Angular 1.X for
> production applications.

Not sure how they can "recommend" 1.X when it's completely incompatible with
2.0. Might as well recommend Ember, React, or literally anything else.

~~~
mooredinty
> Not sure how they can "recommend" 1.X when it's completely incompatible with
> 2.0

I'm tired of people saying this. It's simply not true. The core team has said
multiple times that there will be a migration path and they just announced
today that you will be able to mix v1 and v2 components within the same
project.

~~~
mooredinty
In addition to allowing your app to share components, they are also back
porting parts of v2 to v1. So far, the router and ng-animate and I'm sure more
will come.

~~~
skrowl
I'm also guessing that someone is going to make an "add controllers to 2.0"
addon that will be hugely popular with people slowly upgrading their 1.x apps

------
themoonbus
Interesting... their language really seems geared towards pitching Angular as
a rapid-prototyping tool. They explicitly mention UX designers, but not
developers:

"Express your ideas with clean, understandable code. Angular is simple to
build on, easy to change, and friendly to the way UX designers work. Create a
UI that is beautiful by default, with material design and support for web
components."

~~~
netinstructions
Shouldn't we be rapid-prototyping our ideas? Isn't that what "hackers" do
often? "Hack" something together and then iterate like mad, failing fast on
bad ideas and moving forward with the good ones?

I think a lot of us already see AngularJS as a _development_ framework. A big
part of developing something is also UX design. Do you have UX designers on
your development team? I know that I do, and I can help sell Angular to them
if they feel represented (as they should be).

~~~
themoonbus
Of course you should! I am a UX designer (sort of)! In fact, the only time
I've used Angular was when I used the Ionic framework to create a proof-of-
concept to test with users.

I was just commenting on the fact that they are marketing it as such.
Previously, they didn't really seem to use such language.

I think it's a great move on their part, and it seems like it's a useful tool
for rapid prototyping.

------
raju
I am confused seeing this - This mentions "ES6, AtScript, and the es6-shim"
... but the other story on HN speaks about "Angular2 in TypeScript"
[[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2015/03/05/angula...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2015/03/05/angular-2-0-built-
on-typescript.aspx)]

What am I missing here?

~~~
andrewstuart2
IIRC, AtScript is a superset of both ES6 and TypeScript.

~~~
manojlds
TypeScript + AtScript = TypeScript as per the other announcements.

------
aberatiu
Backward compatibility down the drain.

~~~
dmak
It really is inevitable if you take a look how different 2.0 is. I think its
for the better.

------
misterjinx
White text on white background image ? Look how this renders on 1920x1080
resolution [http://i.imgur.com/sPWpL6C.png](http://i.imgur.com/sPWpL6C.png). I
cannot read that text, I don't understand anything from it.

~~~
alexwolfe
That's been fixed, thanks for reporting.

~~~
misterjinx
Thanks for that. I was able to see it after a force refresh. Looks good now.

------
gnulnx
Wait, what? This is AngularJS? I'm a SysAdmin / DevOps guy that has recently
taken up Web Development, spending the last year or so getting neck deep in
AngularJS.

This looks and feels entirely different, and I don't care to start from
scratch.

~~~
rezistik
You don't really have to start from scratch.

Angular 1.* will be around for awhile. It won't simply stop working.
Eventually they'll stop adding new features, and eventually they'll stop
fixing bugs. I don't know what the timeline is for that but it's far from
immediate.

~~~
gnulnx
What I meant by that is, 2.x looks so different from 1.x, that it feels like
something new.

------
codebeaker
Interesting to see here that the docs still refer to AtScript, where there's
an announcement from Microsoft on the homepage explaining that Angular2.0 will
use Typescript.

------
rdsubhas
And all hell breaks loose again in the JavaScript world.

~~~
woah
The original angular seemed to mostly be advocated for by people new to
JavaScript.

~~~
andrewstuart2
Being new means you're less likely to be tied down by old assumptions and sunk
costs as you evaluate the available tools for your use cases.

------
ibero
their about page is broken, cutting off text of the bio at almost all screen
sizes.

there is a weird "rawgit traffic error" banner across the site.

~~~
rampantprint
The hero is blank on Firefox due to -webkit-linear-gradient. It makes all hero
text invisible to the user.

------
uptown
The API proposal page is currently empty, correct?

------
mooredinty
Angular is the new PHP... Queue the haters

~~~
ffn
Piggy-backing off of this, here's my short list of if-js-framework-were-
languages:

angular = php : obtuse and a little nonsensical at times, yet by far the most
popular tool out there in industry.

ember = ruby : highly decorative and alluring, and it's even built by refugees
of rails

react = haskell : esoteric, functional, and strange enough to come with its
own dialect of js; it's literally the framework built for framework developers
(to learn from)

backbone = C++ : fast because it has so little and therefore so little to slow
it down

jquery = C : at some level, everything else seems to be built on this

meteor = computer language when portrayed on a Hollywood movie : you know,
like in the first Wolverine Xmen movie, whatever language that they used to
program Ryan Reynolds with that allows the user to just type in something like
"Kill him" into the terminal and Ryan Reynolds then attempts to kill wolverine
(sorry spoilers). I don't know if there are any commands other than "kill
him", but it handles the "kill him" command with incredible automagic.

~~~
kin
I would actually put jQuery = PHP because more people hate jQuery the way they
hate PHP

