Reaction to AngularJs 2.0's Announcement

The AngularJS team announced the successor to AngularJS 1.x — AngularJS 2.0. It’s all new and shiney. The anticipated release date is late 2015.

So, what has changed? Well, everything. $scope is gone, controllers are gone, angular.module is gone, directives are gone and jqLite is gone.

Wow, thems are some big changes! How will this impact my existing AngularJS 1.x application? Don’t worry, it won’t, they have a migration path. It’s called a rewrite. From AngularJS 1.x to Angular 2.0. Although, we are holding out hope on this changing.

According to ng-learn.org, AngularJS 2.0 is a complete rewrite. Say what? They are rewriting Angular JS? Someone must have spiked the Google Kool-Aid more than usual.

They do know that rewrites can fail? Just ask Netscape (Netscape 6.0), Borland (Quattro Pro), Microsoft (failed rewrite of MS Word) and Winamp (anyone remember Winamp 3?).

You might wonder what is happening to the truck loads of community goodwill they have built with AngularJS 1.x. It appears they’ve decided to walk away from it.

Kevin Dente’s pointed tweet:

Did Angular just commit suicide?

Time will illuminate whether they can rebuild the lost goodwill that’s been so gashed with this rewrite.

I admit, AngularJS 2.0’s features are enticing. They are scraping the internal module system in favor of ECMAScript 6.0’s built in module system and dependency injection has been revamped. This is nice, but they still will be lacking a thriving eco-system, which they enjoyed with AngularJS 1.x. It’s being called AngularJS 2.0, but it will effectively be a 1.0 product. I can only wonder what brave developers will venture into the darkness with AngularJS 2.0.

It can be surmised that the Angular Team thinks this is a good idea… I hope they know what they are doing.