Hi Dawn, You are welcome. I'm not a core-team member, and I speak on personal terms. I do have regular contact with them tough, and like to keep myself up to date. I will answer your point inline, as far as my knowledge reaches.
> If you tell a seasoned DP-type today that you are working with Angular, my > experience is that they are as likely to give condolences as to ask what it > is. For the sake of folks making decisions today, I really wish the story > regarding Angular 2 were different. Even if Angular 1 and 2 can work > side-by-side, that is a migration strategy, not a long-term goal if 1 will > be at EOL, replaced by completely different coding approaches and > terminology before it even reaches version 2. To start writing code that > will be even more obsolete once you write it than is typical, is a tough > business case. The start-again strategy of Angular 2 does not bode well if > desiring a trustee who respects their users (end-developers), nor does it > make it sound like the current Angular is a good way to write software, > given that it is being completely replaced. > That's a bit shortsighted. The explanation of that will follow. We would like to choose a strategy where over time the developers of > libraries and frameworks have a good understanding that there are > line-of-business developers and software companies too, where they need to > have a good story about their architecture at the point of their > deployment. If the tools they used to write their software are obsolete at > the point they deploy, that's a really bad story for their customers, even > if deployed as SaaS. > > I am sensing that with my question here, I also have a bit of a plea. It > might include things like this: > > 1. Write your libraries however you choose, but do not tell us nor even > lead us into writing with TS given that it would make little sense for us > to start doing that right now. I understand that TS is a superset, but it > results in significantly different patterns for developers using it. Show > us how to continue writing code with the language we are using and how we > can make simple changes to get us to the new approach. Telling us that both > the entire framework is changing and that the language is getting a big > overhaul too, showing examples that look cryptic even to folks currently > using Angular is just too much. In some cases, you are telling folks who > are currently migrating from procedural-ish to functional-ish that they > will then almost immediately need to migrate to oo-ish. It might even be > the case that the reason they never moved to Java or C# is that those > languages did not fit as well as full-stack JavaScript does for their > shops. In other words, you are eliminating the "full-stack JavaScript" > rationale for using Angular, at least from the way it is being marketed. > We all like to talk about the new stuff, and the existing stuff, you know, where guys like you and me make their money become boring fast. That's not just an angular issue, but a problem for our whole tech. I have seen the first talks on how to do NG2 with the current JavaScript. There will come more and more, as the API becomes more stable, and the dust starts to settle. This may still take a while. Bottom line, you can use the full strength of NG2 with your current JS knowledge. Over time, you will gain knowledge off ES6/2015, and you will see that it enables you to become even more efficient as you are now. TS and ES2015 are an addition to what you already know. A lot of stuff in there isn't even new, just some new syntax sugar for things we already do for years. I like to play with the new stuff, and I see that it is very usable. You can use the ES2015 stuff now, if you use a transpiler(fancy word for a JavaScript to somewhat older JavaScript compiler) However, as usual, there is a penalty. You loose speed. Depending on what you are using, that might be acceptable or not. I decided to stick with current JS for my production work for now. I'll keep my eye on the progress, but I dont expect I can switch over to the new stuff for at least 1 to 2 years from now. (perhaps a little bit sooner, a guy might have hope right! ;) ) bottom line, samples will come, as soon as the dust starts to settle, both in ES5 as in 'future javascript' > 2. Provide some videos to balance the current ones I've watched (e.g. from > ng conferences) that my clients, seasoned software professionals, are > unlikely to interpret this way: "Well, unless the current Angular version > really sucks to the extent that we should not use it, it sounds like a > bunch of technically-smart but otherwise overly-ignorant punks who decided > to throw everything out and start new for their own sense of elegance and > perfection rather than having any understanding of their user base. Why > would we want to adopt a product line that acts like this?" How do I answer > that question?!! > I partly answered this already, but I need to add a couple of remarks. Current angular is not a short-term product, It started in 2009, and will have official support until at least end 2016, probably longer. That's a life-span of minimum 7 years. It would have been longer, if the techniques powering angular where not outdated by the pace browsers and JS engines made in that same time span. To cut a long story short, current angular will do fine with current techniques, but it will never work well with the newer ones (web-components being the larges part of that!) As those where not even in the pen on the moment angular was created, it did not take in account what would be needed to support those. That means, that in a changing world, current angular will start falling behind more and more. That is the main reason NG2 is such a big break. Don't get me wrong, if you use the right approach, migrating won't be the nightmare some people seem inclined to make it. > The kicker was that the UI-router is so much better than ng-router that I > can think of no reason that Angular 2.0 could not have adopted it. Why > re-invent THAT wheel. Sheesh! > There are some technical reasons that did not happen. Good ones too, but those are outside the scope of this thread! 3. How do long-term software companies do such projects in a way that would > attract "my kind" who are working with line-of-business apps? There are > many strategies, no doubt, but one that has worked is to put new names on > new products, even new product lines without having or giving a sense of > the writing on the wall. A company can have Gap stores even if they have > Old Navy too. They keep going with the existing product line as long as > makes sense and they keep promoting their existing product line while the > other is being developed and deployed under a completely different name. > They encourage and invest in the community around their current product > line and start a new community that anticipates their new product line > without deflating existing customers. If the new, emerging framework were > called Elephant 1.0, and Angular 2.0 were coming out as a more solid and > faster version of Angular 1, what a hugely different story I would have for > my clients! Not only would Angular 1 be seen as a good choice, but we could > do a tiny upgrade to Angular 2 and get some significant added benefits. > Maybe someday there would be terrific tools to migrate from Angular to > Elephant should we see a need, but we would not have to think about that > any time in the foreseeable future. > Also, I addressed a number of those point already above. NG1 is already long-term supported, but to guarantee real long term support, there was this need for a new approach. So basically NG2 _is_ the long term! The vision the core team has, is correct in my eyes. But I give you that they really suck at marketing :-) The core team are real tech-heads, with their ideas, visions and hart in the right place. Somehow that seems to conflict with being able to market some things properly. I tend to agree, it would have been a better marketing idea to give it a new name. Technically it would be not true, because at heart, it is the same deal, but executed so much better, and more future safe. But a new name would make it easier to sell. > It would be terrific if the Angular folks would market Angular so that > developers want to jump on the bandwagon NOW to do the same thing I'm > likely to do (i.e. Angular 1), not just next year with 2.0. You were there! > Developers were turning toward Angular in droves, in numbers far beyond > Ember and others before it, but I sense little such excitement for it now, > period. Did you blow it and turn the user base sour? If you don't think so, > then give us a great story that we can share with our clients and their > end-customers. I welcome stories from existing customers too. I have a bit > of a difficult sell to do (to sell myself, for starters). > I still see lots off developers coming to angular. To date, it still is the most complete and tested framework that's available to front-end developers. The competition is getting closer, but are not there yet. React is just rendering pipeline, not a complete framework, you need a lot of additional stuff to make level the playing field with angular. a lot of people looking around are coming to this same conclusion. Our community still grows rapidly. Of coarse current angular is not without its issues. And it turns out that to solve those issues permanently, a full rewrite was indeed needed. It takes courage to admit that, and even more to actually go out and start just that. I can not give the team enough cudo's for that. What I'm seeing already from the 2.0 version, is that all those issues are indeed solved. And it is even barely an alpha version now. However, a painless migration will probably be a pipe-dream. A lot of stuff can be handled to write the old directives in new angular (most of them are not hard to reproduce in new Ng!) that well ease a lot of the pain. Also I think that it is possible to write a program that you can feed 'old' directives that then will spit out new ones. Not fully automatic and painless, but wit muss less pain then is predicted now. Apologies for grabbing a soap box, but we have some decisions to make, and > it could be so much easier to present a rationale, so I thought I would do > a little bit of begging for help with that just in case there are ears to > hear here. > I happen to like soap boxes ;) I seem able to climb one too occasionally. > Your comments here, Sander, are a helpful start. Thanks! --dawn > I'm glad for that. I hope my additions will help you some more, to sketch you a more complete picture! with kind regards Sander -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AngularJS" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to angular+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to angular@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/angular. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
