The Angular team’s exploration of new authoring formats has sparked confusion in the community, with concerns it’s purely cosmetic. At ng-Poland, team members shared multiple reasons for the potential change, including the time-consuming adaptation of TypeScript functionality in templates.
The recent announcement that the Angular team is exploring potential new authoring formats has stirred some confusion within the community. With little initial explanation, many developers were left questioning the necessity of these changes, with some suspecting it was merely for appearance’s sake, leading to understandable frustration.
Last week, ng-Poland, the largest Angular conference this year, took place. Four Angular team members were present, providing some long-awaited context.
Alex Rickabaugh, Angular’s framework lead, clarified that the TypeScript used in Angular templates is not true TypeScript; it merely resembles it, which means that each new feature needs a separate implementation. For instance, Matthieu Riegler had to dedicate significant time just to enable the typeof operator in templates.
feat(compiler): add support for the `typeof` keyword in template expressions
#58183
This commit adds the support for typeof in template expressions like interpolations, bindings, control flow blocks etc.
This situation raises an essential question for the community:
Would we prefer the Angular team to continue reimplementing TypeScript functionality in templates, or focus their efforts on other important tasks, even if it means adapting to a new authoring format?
Pawel Koszlowski from the Angular team also shared updates on Angular’s ongoing "signalization". The team aims to introduce Signals into forms, working towards a unified "Signal Form". We can also anticipate Signals in the router and possibly an httpResource that could replace HttpClient.
The slides are available at
ng-poland 2024 [public slides] - Google Slides
docs.google.com
That’s all for this week. See you in the next episode!
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