Today’s read: Our entire team of engineers use this front end development guide, then chained to A Study Plan To Cure JavaScript Fatigue; then read that funny / sad / sarcastic / true article: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 for a third time.
I did not get much out of the big read of the very authoritative Our entire team of engineers use this front end development guide, other than the feeling of: again, The tide has turned, I am out of date.
I switched to Angular js 1.x about 2 years ago through a job change. I changed my job because I could no longer stand using Ext js. Ext js just felt painfully cumbersome, out of date and isolated. Ext js operates in its own ever-dwindling ecosystem. (As in Angular js, Ext js also had its huge change of heart in service of the sea change in web development, Ext js 4 from 3 is an unrecognizable beast. I do not even know what version Ext js current stands)
2 years ago, jQuery had already been on its path of accelerated decline for a while. To my ears, Angular was all the rage. All the terms: 2 way data binding, `directives`, `controllers` were floating in the web development sphere like pollen that I hungrily breathed in and struggled to master.
The time now is 2017. Angular 2.x, 4.x … and who knows what, surely has alienated developers to a point of no return, now the darling word hanging on the lips of most developers is React. React. React. React.
The word of wisdom (at least to a newbie) now is: JavaScript is easy, framework and libraries are hard to choose. If you must choose (Yes, you must!), you must choose React. React. React.
And what is it for a front end engineer like me?
My 2 years of experiences with Angular had trained me with 2 great things in UI: Dependency Injection and Karma Unit tests. However, as I got deeper and deeper into the Angular jungle, a lot of unexpected flaws did surface. Angular state management can be a pain, angular scope watch is a huge pain, Angular tangle of factories and services and controllers and directives can be hard to untangle, its many indecipherable symbols (I am always grumpy at Angular’s “abuse” of so many special characters on the English keyboard).
Of course, all of the above is exactly what made Angular 1.x outdated and what elevates Angular 2 and above and TypeScript to the only official Angular.
So, another crossroad!
Angular 2 is nothing like Angular 1.x. That they share the same name only magnifies the irony and exacerbates the pain.
I tried briefly Angular 2, with resistance and resentment in my heart, then I hated its bloated code base …. I tried with one starter Angular 2 project and tried to deploy to Heroku and found i need to jump through many hoops that I no longer wished to jump …
Now after reading yet another guide, I am going for React.