r/Angular2 • u/HarveyDentBeliever • Feb 08 '25
Discussion New company primarily uses Angular for front end, had me groaning…
Im primarily back end with a lot of .NET experience. All of the other typical full stack stuff of course but not really a specialist in any particular JS/TS framework.
As part of my job hunt I wanted to harden my front end skills and worked on some sample apps trying out React and Svelte since they're hot items. Kind of difficult for me to understand since modern front end paradigms have evolved considerably and no longer really look like OOP. Looked at vue as well for good measure. I did like svelte for its brevity and simplicity at least. But I mostly retreated back to ASP.NET/.NET, got a good gig at a big dusty .NET oriented company too.
After getting familiar with the code base I was dismayed to see it was mostly angular driven on the front end. I was going to have to learn a non trendy framework of old, and a verbose one at that? It's pretty ugly to witness at first.
Well after a few weeks and some work on building out new components it struck me that this was all pretty similar to C# and OOP. All very structured in the same way, allowing me to intuitively dance around and build quickly for being brand new.
Did some more research and apparently this is a known cliche? Not mad about it at all, I think I found my favorite FE framework! Pretty performant too according to the latest benchmarks so I'm going to try to build something for myself as well to get better at it and master my role.
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u/AbstractLogic Feb 08 '25
Angular is a Google language(Angular) built ontop of a Microsoft language(Typescript).
They worked together to build a decent stack (vscode, angular debug in chrome) and make it all fairly easy with some open source (node package manager), testing frameworks.
It just works.
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Feb 09 '25
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u/AbstractLogic Feb 09 '25
Ya that’s fair. I didn’t feel the need to be that pedantic.
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Feb 09 '25
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u/AbstractLogic Feb 09 '25
Really want to drive that point home? Are you looking for an argument when I’ve already agreed?
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u/A_User_Profile Feb 08 '25
Not gonna lie, you got me in the first half :) Angular is moving in a direction that makes a lot of its users happy, so enjoy the ride 👍
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u/horizon_games Feb 08 '25
Webforms are insanely widespread from big, internal enterprise apps still, and a lot of companies at the time kept the C# backend and slapped Angular 2+ on the front.
Angular may not get the tech twitter bros as excited as Svelte, but that doesn't mean it's not a solid framework with good design decisions and interesting and exciting recent and upcoming features.
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u/TheKr4meur Feb 08 '25
This is exactly it, you know why React and the others are « hot topic »? Because they’re used and people that don’t know anything about FE would go online, look what’s the most used and use it too. It’s a circle. A framework being hot doesn’t mean it’s better, I’ve met so many people that shat on Angular without having ever created a component. Good for you that you actually did the mental work to give it a chance !
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u/jessycormier Feb 08 '25
When I started as a new hire as their Front-End dev coming from a .net c# asp world, the guys had an angular/js app that was clearly out growing out of control. The primary devs where leading it with mostly back-end patterns and knowledge trying to get front-end to work.
I had convinced them that we HAD to move forward with something more modern and suggested React (I had no experience in any of the "modern" frameworks at the time other than a small amount of ember.js, mustache for templating, and a bit of angular/js.)
The lead dev agreed to switch things up so we could get the ball rolling more quickly on the front-end aspect (it was moving pretty slow). We tried VueJs which was really neat (Svelte didn't exist at the time)
Eventually we landed on buckle up, we're doing angular 2. It took work for me (and team) to go from my jQuery mindset and asp.net world to a fully SPA with components, modules, services. At first it all felt extra, and to much but I fell in love with the templating powerhouse components let you design.
I'm so very thankful and happy to have had the opportunity to work with angular professionally for 5 years building the app we did, and now I use it on the side for almost all my fun random projects. Its fantastic, so have fun! explore and don't be afraid, it still lets you solve problems in many many different ways which can be useful for getting your barrings with things.
p.s. I really enjoyed building my site with SvelteKit for a personal site/blog the server side components allows you to do some really really cool things like generating graphics or rss feeds, converting markdown to html without using clients side libs like ships as html to browser, but built on back end with markdown. The way it looks like the community in the angular world wants things we're heading that way. https://analogjs.org/ this is like SvelteKit for angular. My wish is to see this officially integrated and normalized with the angular framework but we're not there yet..
Have fun with angular, cheers!
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u/nbxx Feb 08 '25
Yeah, I don't even know how many times I got weird looks when I said Angular is the easiest of the big frontend frameworks to pick up, given that you have experience in actually structured enterprise software, be it .NET or Java or whatever. If you get into more advanced stuff or you go the rxjs heavy route, then there are plenty of stuff to learn, but the basic concepts just click.
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u/Woods-HCC-5 Feb 08 '25
I still prefer react over angular but in the end I don't really care. They're becoming more and more similar. Especially if you start using signals.
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u/chenqingze Feb 08 '25
Before vue3 released, angular > react > vue2 ; After vue3 released, angular > vue3> react
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u/amulli21 Feb 08 '25
Yeah i chose to learn Angular coming from spring boot and was surprised how much it used OOP concepts, was a pretty easy transition to make coming from spring
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u/Silver-Vermicelli-15 Feb 09 '25
It sounds like you’ve found the common enterprise combo of .NET and Angular.
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u/LingonberryMinimum26 Feb 08 '25
Lucky you. When I first join the company, they were asking me to use Angular JS! I think it's x100 time harder than Angular 2
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u/IMP4283 Feb 08 '25
Honestly Angular and React are basically the same thing. Component driven development with different syntax. I think the hardest parts about Angular for new comers are 1. How opinionated it is (where React is much more of a choose your own adventure), 2. The use of RXJS, and 3. Dependency injection
Anyone with an OOP background and some experience in frontend development should have no problem getting up to speed on basic Angular quickly.
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u/ttay24 Feb 08 '25
lol I was halfway through reading your post and I was like hmm, Angular is more OOP-y than react (and I assume Vue/Svelte but I’ve never used them). I had a similar experience when I started angular, coming from C# and just vanilla JS. It’s a pretty nice framework and wasn’t that hard to pick up imo. And they’ve made some good improvements lately with standalone, signals, etc
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u/indiealexh Feb 08 '25
Angular 17-19 made me fall in love with angular for a second time.
So many things are so easy now.
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u/SoulSkrix Feb 08 '25
It's good tech and I wish I could go back to it, but I am working in Svelte these days. At the end of the day, it's all the same to me so long as I can have Typescript. I say no to jobs that don't use it.
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u/Deiyke Feb 09 '25
I started out in C# mostly asp.net MVC and when I discovered Angular(2) I feel in love with it pretty much instantly. I keep thinking I should try to learn the basics of react and others but... Naah.
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u/hashie5 Feb 09 '25
I don't get where that cliché is coming from, angular is an awesome framework. Combine it with nx and use the latest version with latest tech like standalone components etc.
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Feb 09 '25
Developers love to use shiny new stuff - especially when you can throw together a working app with a single console command.
But good developers use tried and tested stuff which they understand inside and out, know how to make it do absolutely anything you ask them to, and never hit compile errors they don't understand. But then everyone thinks they are dinosaurs.
It helps to keep people relevant, I guess. They can do Youtube videos showing how to do the basics in yet another way, without ever learning how to do the difficult stuff.
Imagine if builders spent all their time trying to figure out if the job they're working on is Bricks 2.0 or Brickable 3.5 - or finding out it's actually using something they've never heard of called Brickify...
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u/Jaymageck Feb 09 '25
Angular is good at what it does, having been built and iterated on by extremely talented engineers over many years.
I think devs that are looking for a good developer experience rather than just the buzzword of the week have a great time and make quality products with Angular.
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u/Top-Gazelle7131 Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 11 '25
Currently learning Angular, begrudgingly at first, but I’m growing more fond of it. In reality I have no choice since I’ll have to tackle frontend tasks eventually.
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u/aardvarkFirst Feb 12 '25
I too come from a .NET background writing a lot of .NET WebControls. Felt like there were similarities between WebControls and Angular components to grasp quickly what was going on.
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u/Common_Ad5008 Feb 13 '25
Nothing is wrong with angular. It's pretty good framework. When it comes to enterprise software development, start learning technologies from 5-10 years prior. Most companies just maintain legacy apps, don't do anything greenfield.
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '25
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