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Comment by Tade0

7 days ago

Angular has been my main framework for the past 9 years, so I guess I can shed some light on this:

AngularJS came before React and being a Google product, gained enough inertia in large organizations that given the choice, the decision makers preferred to migrate to Angular 2+, which at the very least had a passing similarity to the previous iteration, instead of jumping to a wholly new framework like React.

The very last AngularJS to Angular 2+ migration I participated in happened in 2020, when it was already known that the former would reach end of life by the end of 2021. That is how reluctant corporations are to rewriting the entire frontend codebase.

Mind you, I've used other frameworks like Vue in an Angular-oriented company, but the project was: greenfield, small and underfunded, so we had some more liberty in choosing what to use.

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Tade0

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elfly  7 days ago

This whole thing is the problem. AngularJS was released in 2010. If in 2010 I'd know that the damn thing would die in 2021, and that I would have to rewrite it all by that date, I would not have used the damn thing in the first place.

I also at some point inherited an app written in Vue 2. By the time I got it, Vue 3 was already out and a couple of years later, Vue 4, completely different to Vue 2, was out. Rewriting was not an option, so I had to create a docker image that can compile the damn thing offline, cause if some part of the supply chain breaks, well, that's it.

Ten or eleven years is not a super long time in enterprise software. Having to keep upgrading and changing libraries just cause the devs of the libraries get bored should not be a thing.

  • mikrotikker  6 days ago

    This is why I struggled and struggled to omit JS at all costs on a greenfield project - many apps from even 5 years ago by now fired teams fail to build with cryptic npm messages. And if you get past that you have to deal with webpack or some such junk. We settled with go fyne which compiles to wasm to handle both local and remotely accessible use cases. Trade off is not as much freedom and a fixed feature set but I know it's gonna work after 5 godamn years.

  • jamesfinlayson  7 days ago

    > If in 2010 I'd know that the damn thing would die in 2021

    Was it obvious back then? I had to work on an AngularJS site for a while and it was the most confusing thing ever. Having come from React I couldn't understand the complexity but maybe it was still better than callback hell in jQuery?

  • paulryanrogers  7 days ago

    React--for all its warts--hasn't had a major backward compatibility break. Microsoft Windows selling point for a long time was backward compatibility.