> They had minimal API changes in the last 10 years

The 1 to 2 transition was one hell of a burn though; people are probably still smarting...

You aren’t wrong. I basically stopped using any OSS code backed by Google as a result.

I’d pushed Angular over React[0] for a massive project, and it worked well, but the migration to Angular 2 when it came created a huge amount of non-value-adding work.

Never again.

I don’t even really want to build anything against Gemini, despite how good it is, because I don’t trust Google not to do another rug pull.

[0] I’ve never enjoyed JSX/TSX syntax, nor appreciated the mix of markup with code, but I’ve subsequently learned to live with it.

No one forced you to migrate immediately. (Also, non-value-adding work? You don't think the rewrite to TS did not bring any value? And thanks to that rewrite that app can be upgraded even today to Angular v21. And likely it'll be the case for many years.)

React also went through a lot of churn. (Still does.) There's no magic optimal duration for keeping API stability. Not in general and not for specific projects.

Ecosystems sometimes undergo a phase-shift. Sometimes they take a long time, based on the size. Python 3 was released in 2008, just a year before Angular 1. And the last Py2 release was in 2020, about 2-3 years before the last AngularJS version. (And of course there are many businesses running on py2 still. I know at least one.) These things take plenty of time.

Angular1 was pretty opinionated, willing to break with the tradition of just add one more jQuery plugin.

Miško was working at Google, he persuaded some people to take a look at the framework that he and Adam Abrons were tinkering with.

Angular 2 was announced in 2014 January. And then v1 still got years of support, even the component architecture was "backported" around 1.5 (in 2016?)

You can run old v1 code side-by-side in a v2+ app up until v17. (At least the v17 docs describe the process in full and later docs link to this page. https://v17.angular.io/guide/upgrade )

...

Google did a pretty good job IMHO. Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects. (Though the sate of AOSP comes to mind.)

> Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects.

It abandoned the Material Design web components project, which, I think, attracted some Polymer people.

Speaking of Polymer, it has evolved into Lit; but I understand there is no more support for that project from Google. Lit has joined the OpenJS foundation to stay afloat. The Googlers that used to work on Lit, and on Material Design web components have mostly left.

Also, remember the Workbox project? A simple setup for service workers? It's barely alive.

The angular material design library is so much better than the react one. And it is supported by google. The material CDK is amazing to create custom components easily

> You don't think the rewrite to TS did not bring any value?

I mean, I don't really like TypeScript, and I never have. It's ugly, boilerplatey, and inelegant. I am not a fan.

So... no.

But, again, some battles you have to accept you've lost. TS is everywhere and there's not much getting away from it.

I think JS is still overall more popular than TS, but if your team forces TS then yeah. It's like Java devs reluctantly switched to JS and were like, this needs more boilerplate.

Yeah, I spent years in Java and then even longer in .NET and it felt like everything I was getting a bit fed up of in those worlds had invaded JS. 20 years ago I could never have imagined defending JS as a language but, as time wore on, I started to appreciate its more stripped back syntax. And then a lot of what’s been added in later ES standards has been great so it seems even more unnecessary to layer TS on top.

It took me a while to appreciate JS too. Thought it was just the beginner language until I used it. Also had to learn the hard way that a web backend is hard to do efficiently without an event loop.

It was one hell of a ride, but I would say the Angular team did one hell of a job too, supporting the glue code until v18 (not sure if the latest version still does).

Having both old and new Angular running in one project is super weird, but everything worked out in the end.

Well, the official statement is that 1 and 2 are 2 different frameworks. That’s why they were later named to angular JS and angular, to avoid confusion.

The migration path between angular 1 and 2 is the same as react and angular, it’s just glue holding 2 frameworks together

And that change happened 10 years ago

> That’s why they were later named to angular JS and angular, to avoid confusion.

Angular.js and angular. That's not confusing at all :-)

this -- even google search results were mixed up

should be more different: eg "rect-angular vs angular"

Easy migration was promised but never delivered. Angular 2 was still full of boilerplate. “Migrating” an AngularJS project to Angular 2 is as much work as porting it to React or anything else.

So yes, people got burnt (when we were told that there will be a migration path), and I will never rely on another Google-backed UI framework.

> I will never rely on another Google-backed UI framework.

Lit is pretty good :-) Though it was never positioned as a framework. And it recently was liberated from google.

I tried it once, and it was like, you have to edit 5 files to add 1 button.

same 5 files in every project at every company on earth

Not the ones that changed to the non-ngModule way

I'll second that Angular provides a great experience these days, but they have definitely had substantial API changes within the last few years: standalone components, swapping WebPack for esbuild, the new control-flow syntax, the new unit-test runner, etc...

Was going to say, I only vaguely look at Angular code from adjacent projects at work, and noticed all of a sudden the entire structure changed with the ngModule deprecation thing. Glad I'm not knee-deep in that.