Angular, when it feels right, makes me incredibly productive, but I feel like I spend 90% of my time banging my head against a brick wall.
One of the single biggest usability features of anything is giving things appropriate names. The "other half" of Karlton's law is well in effect here. Angular fails miserably at this task. And that makes reading documentation, as well as maintaining enough context in my head to be productive nearly impossible.
From a documentation standpoint, the documentation focuses on "this is how this function works internally" rather than "this is how you use it to produce results".
I want to like Angular. So much of it feels right, and technically it seems excellent. It really is a usability nightmare, though.
I feel like I spend 90% of my time banging my head against a brick wall.
Why do people want to work with a technology like that?
Personally I feel that the worst part of programming is when you're stuck trying to decipher the inner workings of an intermediate layer. It's so frustrating and futile, and I'm not learning anything generally useful because mastering arcane workarounds for technology layer X doesn't translate to anything else.
I'll much rather work with technology that doesn't make me feel magically productive 10% of the time, but does make me actually productive 99% of the time. There are plenty of those around.
I agree. What I'm trying to determine is whether or not it's a rabbit hole going down. Am I using a very powerful tool that's user interface is fine, but takes a little bit of time to learn. Or am I using a very powerful tool that has a user interface that's just bad. I'm honestly not sure - I haven't spent enough time with it to tell.
And yes. A programming language or framework is/has a user interface.
I agree with you that it's frustrating at time. Especially when angular does magic stuff that you're just supposed to know. Like fuck with your existing links and stop existing forms from working.
And sometimes, real easy things are so complicated.. For instance, try to make a form post on the current page. (Hint: If you don't have action="", then the form doesn't post. But, by default, no action usually means submit to current page.) (Hint2: Probably more a hack than a real solution, but I've just used an onclient event on the submit button to manually post the form..)
Sure, if you read all the doc and stumble on this page.. but for a newcomer it's damn surprising to see existing code not working. It's like adding jquery and having random links disappearing.
One of the single biggest usability features of anything is giving things appropriate names. The "other half" of Karlton's law is well in effect here. Angular fails miserably at this task. And that makes reading documentation, as well as maintaining enough context in my head to be productive nearly impossible.
From a documentation standpoint, the documentation focuses on "this is how this function works internally" rather than "this is how you use it to produce results".
I want to like Angular. So much of it feels right, and technically it seems excellent. It really is a usability nightmare, though.