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Martijn Boland Blog

Angular is the new uncool?

/ 2 min read

This week, more details about the future of Angular 2.0 have been announced at the ng-europe conference (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNmWybAyBHI for the video). After the first announcements made in march 2014, more details have been disclosed. Angular 2.0 will not be backwards compatible with the current 1.x version.

It backfired. People are truly upset about the breaking changes (see this reddit thread, for example).

The interesting thing is: why is everyone suddenly so upset? From the start of Angular 2.0, it has always been clearly stated that the new version won’t be compatible with the current version in order to make drastic improvements. Also, the current 1.x version will be supported for quite a while (1,5 – 2 years after the release of 2.0, probably late 2015).

No problem or…?

I think the Angular team underestimated the impact of their message: by making such drastic changes they are giving the impression that the current 1.x version kind of sucks. To make things worse, in the presentation, they used the R.I.P. metaphor for the concepts of Angular 1.x that are going to be removed. Quick unfounded conclusion: Angular 1.x is dead.

People are upset because this message makes them feel that the cool technology they loved yesterday has suddenly become uncool and legacy. The new cool is still at least a year away and in the mean time we have to work with uncool technology, and envy other frameworks that have managed to stay cool.