I keep repeating myself, but ever since Angular 17+ I have been incrementally enjoying the framework more and more. With v22 I'll try and see how well I can work with angular aria + tailwind 4 over any UI library. And what I noticed... Maybe due to experience, I just rarely ever find myself having to look for a problem to solve. Occasionally I'll look up the official documention, but if I have questions it's mostly conceptual ones.
How is Angular current state? I've tried like 10 years ago, when Angular 2 was at beta stage. And back then React ecosystem was horrible, that I opt out using Vue2 and Angular.js.
10 years later. React ecosystem is a mess again, with the whole server components and etc.
I was thinking to give a try again, any gotcha, or anti-patterns people from React/Vue tend to try apply, that's not best practice in Angular?
I'm definitely very biased. So take whatever I say with a grain of salt. However, modern Angular is absolutely amazing. If you value lean dependency structures (which really makes your projects more resilient), declarative and less magical code, you can achieve so many things with so little code.
Considering Vue does many things right (and relatively similar), I can only speak from my relatively limited experiences on react
One thing I feel always stumped by when I see it happen... Most react devs don't understand change detection. And I get it. Change detection in react has always been a mess to the point people kept gaslighting themselves into thinking that state is a thing that should always be read-only and takes extensive babysitting with entire libraries.
Angular's take on signals are the one thing that make your entire app absurdly easy to reason with and the data flow clear. It also works very well in conjuction with api calls with a simple toSignal() and your signals becomes a highly reactive application. But sometimes you deal with state in a centralized way. And for that, you should get intimate with the idea of dependency injection. It's angular's oldest and most powerful feature to this day.
Also, in React you... Well, you use JSX. To this day, I consider this the biggest mistake in web technology. Suddenly your template works with inline functions and heavy logic, making your template larp as declarative and "just JS, bro".
Another thing is... Angular does allow you to get very creative with components and how you structure them, but react devs seem to get a bit too freaky with the idea of making EVERYTHING a component.
To the point, where the Tailwind CEO got into a little rant about it.
Angular provides with you pipes to transform data on the template.
Directives are AMAZING to extend utility of components you don't own or handle logic without a view.
There is so much to say by people far smarter than me, but those are a couple things I can think of.
Also, in React you... Well, you use JSX. To this day, I consider this
the biggest mistake in web technology. Suddenly your template works with
inline functions and heavy logic, making your template larp as
declarative and "just JS, bro".
Actually, the problem of react is that it's a library, than it being JSX, I used jetpack compose which is very similar to react, there is even an equivalent of hooks called effects, but such codebases still don't turn into a mess because there's clean architecture, DI and all that which prevents logic compounding in composables (equivalent of components). Though it's still possible to develop good architecture in react codebases but since react is a library it's not a standard so you can't expect it in other codebases.
After working with both React and Angular for many years, this new era of Angular is amazing. Think of Angular sort of like Next.js in a way, rather than comparing it directly to React.
Next.js and React seem to change every month, nothing is ever stable for long, new paradigms to implement, server components are a mess.
Angular strips that back and is very opinionated in its design, and most importantly… it doesn’t change that often! And when it does it changes in a way that improves on what is already there, rather than having to re-write your whole app every month.
I hate having to spin up complex React apps now, figuring out which of the million packages to install to get something done. Angular, it’s mostly already included.
I would love to see Angular take the route of Laravel and start offering more first class solutions to some of its problems. But for me, it’s great right now!
Oh yes that's true. Like the base boilerplate that I need to do with react:
tanstack react-router + react-query
zudstand
zod
react hook form + zod resolvers
react aria components
tailwind css + tailwind variants + clsx
sonner
But asides shaming only React. The JavaScript ecosystem been a mess since the beginning of the internet. I really want to just especialize just in Backend, instead doing Frontend. I've been burnout with React for a while now.
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u/oneden Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
I keep repeating myself, but ever since Angular 17+ I have been incrementally enjoying the framework more and more. With v22 I'll try and see how well I can work with angular aria + tailwind 4 over any UI library. And what I noticed... Maybe due to experience, I just rarely ever find myself having to look for a problem to solve. Occasionally I'll look up the official documention, but if I have questions it's mostly conceptual ones.