I recall the first Angular.js meet-up I attended. To my surprise there were a number of recruiters there. They were taking names and kicking butt (with job offers on the spot). The demand was so high, that anyone was easily able to get work if they had even a bit of Angular.js experience. Who knew that meet-ups were the interviews of the day?
Angular Changes
Then it happened. The older Angular.js architecture changed, and for a good reason. It had been a JavaScript framework in "theory" only. They had locked down JavaScript to the extent that ES6 modules couldn't work as designed. JavaScript was a prisoner to Angular, held hostage to what Angular decided.
Angular 2-10
Angular's new changes allowed JavaScript and Typescript to control their own destiny based on ECMA standards. A great relief, with a very good architecture. However, their adoption of Typescript put off a lot of the JavaScript base as Typescript's reception was lukewarm to the leaders of the JavaScript community.
Angular 10 is stellar.
React Charges Forward
The power of React is indisputable. How many billions of posts does Facebook have daily? Have you ever seen major problems with Facebook? Indeed React was and still is a very strong architecture. It's the most popular web library today.
Typescript was adopted into React subsequently and many today prefer this option.
Is Angular Still a Good Skillset?
The answer is yes. There are many large corporations who have been with Angular since the beginning. This leaves plenty of work in Migration arena as well as plenty of work in using the new Angular Architecture for new work. This makes the job market robust even today.
So what's the future?
We've written many articles on the concept of Polymorphic Composition. Its power lay in re-usability. The future is in having tool-kits of our own-making; which, are reusable regardless of which View framework or library we use. The Views themselves only account for about 10% of the code anyway.
It's the business logic, array manipulation, event handling, reusable libraries we create, and styling that count.
The future from a view perspective is 'getting closer to the metal'. As HTML continues to improve, (think HTML5) we are seeing trends in the direction of native HTML with vanilla Typescript and JavaScript support. Just because HTML5 Web Components never took off like the big 3, doesn't mean it's an invalid design.
The Future is...
Polymorphic Compositional libraries mostly of our own making and pedal-to-the-metal View libraries. Svelte, Lit-HTML, or WebComponents are the future of Views while WebAssembly will open up other possibilities.
The big 3 will live on due to their immense installed base and the improvements they will make. If we create truly generic reusable libraries, we as developers can apply our toolkits to any View in the future. Prove it to yourself by ensuring all the work you do going forward is:
- Asynchronous
- Truly Generic
- Added to your toolkit
Top comments (4)
I can confirm. I work as a fullstack consultant in the enterprise field and here angular is very big. One reason might be that since angular is very opiniated and is shipped batteries-included, different frontend projects become more standardized, which is what you want as a coorp.
I love Angular. I worked for a startup that was on a Java / Angular stack and Angular with TypeScript was a pleasure to work on. Google has done a great job making the framework a great developer experience out of the box
I no longer work with that stack (edit: at my job) but I will still choose Angular as my framework-of-choice when working on Ionic side projects
Yeah plenty of jobs. I prefer React, but things have a habit of sticking around b/c large companies can just go swapping out tech stacks every few years. So, jQuery, angular1, even all the things are still out there to some extent. I don't personally want to work on it though!
Angular is the second most popular javascript framework after react and its older and more established. So it's likely to be around for a long time.