The last time I did web development, I used Angular 1.2 or something like that. I had some forms and many different views that talked to some REST APIs.
It was never clear to me why/when I would need React. I read and worked through some tutorials years ago, and while the reactive/one way flow pattern was nice, I never had a problem with Angular.
I recognize there have been many versions of Angular since then. And there are several web development frameworks, complex build tooling, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, I’m still writing services in Java that handle 20,000 requests per second for a service that brings in revenue in the billions of dollars a year. And I’m writing C++ (very straightforward, no templates, few uses of pointers, etc) for cross platform mobile code. I have some Spark pipelines all written in Scala.
Meanwhile the web stack continues to evolve… new technologies all just for rendering web pages. I don’t understand why. Admittedly there’s far more complexity in our use cases today than the HTML I was writing in 1999, but much of it is unnecessary bloat from bored developers.
Sometimes running into AngularJS was not too bad of an experience, since it's relatively simplistic when compared to what's needed to get it running (no complicated toolchain, such as with TS -> JS).
But most of the times it's a pain, because of it not scaling well to larger projects. I've actually seen projects where controllers grow to the length of thousands of lines because the developers didn't feel comfortable with introducing new ones in the pre-existing codebase, due to how the scoping works, due to how they'd need to set up the data models and care about initialization of everything, as well as custom integrations with validation libraries and other JS cruft (due to it not quite being "battieries included", like the new Angular is).
Now personally, i really liked how they did error messages (which gave you URLs that you could navigate to, with a bit of context in them; though it would be better with a locally hosted docs server), but a lot of things were awkward, such as their binding syntax: https://blog.krawaller.se/posts/dissecting-bindings-in-angul...
Luckily, AngularJS seems to finally be dead, so we'll get to migrate to something else soon, hopefully. And the projects that won't will be red flags enough for the people who don't like such challenges to turn the other way - truly a litmus test of sorts.
It was never clear to me why/when I would need React. I read and worked through some tutorials years ago, and while the reactive/one way flow pattern was nice, I never had a problem with Angular.
I recognize there have been many versions of Angular since then. And there are several web development frameworks, complex build tooling, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, I’m still writing services in Java that handle 20,000 requests per second for a service that brings in revenue in the billions of dollars a year. And I’m writing C++ (very straightforward, no templates, few uses of pointers, etc) for cross platform mobile code. I have some Spark pipelines all written in Scala.
Meanwhile the web stack continues to evolve… new technologies all just for rendering web pages. I don’t understand why. Admittedly there’s far more complexity in our use cases today than the HTML I was writing in 1999, but much of it is unnecessary bloat from bored developers.