[Nemcue]

Cons:

1. Typescript. If your team isn't familiar with it it's not trivial to get everyone on board. The up-front cost can absolutely be worth it in the long run, but there's some friction in the day-to-day work with managing type definition files and looking up esoteric lint-errors from the Typescript compiler.

2. RXJS. Canonical NG2 should use Observables, and rxjs is not a trivial library to learn the ins and outs of. Add to that that there's no clean way of doing testing with Observables at the moment (integrating with the rxjs testing schedulers is very finicky). This is doubly true if you're using ngrx (which you probably should).

3. Template language. I'm one of those who don't think it's a very good idea to bring a new DSL into html. I'd much rather do it the React-way of bringing HTML into JS instead of relying on a very complex compiler to do magic behind the scenes. This becomes a bit better with the template pre-compilation, but it's still new syntax that you need to learn and keep in mind. Some of which is not intuitive nor well documented (i.e. how pipes and parentheses work together).

4. It feels unfinished. This is to be expected since it's just on it's initial release, but the sharp edges do show up quite a lot. For example we very often have to do manual subscription and unsubscription of Observables in Components. This feeling also goes for quite a few of the community addons, such as the browser-extension. While I absolutely applaud their efforts, it's far from reaching the quality of e.g. the Ember-Inspector.

5. Sub-par debugging experience. When you get any errors there's a mile long stack trace filled with rxjs and zone.js garble, making it very hard to actually figure out what's going on. When there actually are custom error-messages they are not very informative, with you having to fundamentally grok how parts of NG2 works to even come close to understanding why it's not working (getting this a lot with the change detection).

6. Lack of documentation. I tried to stay very far away from Angular 1 since I found its documentation to be very low quality (probably a symptom of Angular 1 being poorly engineered as well). The NG2 docs are definitely better, but I feel like my mental model for reasoning about how things work was still very weak when I had finished going through the docs. There's some really huge gaps in there (testing) and a lot of the really complicated stuff that you will stumble over is only really documented in semi-old blog posts.

[emodendroket]

> 5. Sub-par debugging experience. When you get any errors there's a mile long stack trace filled with rxjs and zone.js garble, making it very hard to actually figure out what's going on. When there actually are custom error-messages they are not very informative,

And they said your angular 1 experience wouldn't carry over.

[nkassis]

On 3. I've found Aurelia templates to be much better in that regard. Their templates are valid HTML and compile well. I'm not a huge fan of embedding html within the JS (even with JSX) been easier to work with separate template files and keep as much JS out of them as possible. This has helped reduce harder to debug errors that crop up when the JS inside templates fails.

[stephenhuey]

I concur. Aurelia feels much more like the standard HTML that I've been working with since the 90s, only more powerful. Hence we get power without unnecessary complexity.

[Sacho]

> 5. Sub-par debugging experience.

I've worked with AngularJS and React. After spending enough time with each framework that I'm "productive" with them and don't get constantly confused by what's going on, this is now by far the most important reason to me when adopting a framework. React(and Redux) just spoil you with an awesome debugging experience, and it's just painful for me to go back to any set of tools that takes some of that away. The rest of the points I've already "suffered" through with AngularJS, and it is my opinion that they are a rough, but surmountable cost. Having a poor debugging experience, however, just kills my willingness to work.

(For the record, AngularJS has some debugging aides - you can inspect scopes pretty easily given a DOM element. However, the watches and digest cycles, which do all the heavy-lifting, are pretty much opaque - you need to have a good understanding of how your watch expressions are compiled into watch functions and place conditional breakpoints deep within the framework in order to inspect why a certain watch is not being called/being called too many times)

[throwanem]

> I tried to stay very far away from Angular 1 since I found its documentation to be very low quality (probably a symptom of Angular 1 being poorly engineered as well).

I haven't found either of these to be the case. Is your experience recent? If so, will you expand on it? I like Angular 1(.5) quite a bit, but I'd be interested to hear more about a different perspective.

[akst]

My experience with Angular documentation was similar, as well as the getting starting guide.

I remember posting an issue on stack overflow about an issue I was having on the first few pages of the guide, I realised I had misread the docs, and I answered the question myself. But that post is now my top voted question on SO, so I don't think I was alone on my experience with the Angular docs. Mind you this was 2014.

Compared with my experience with the Ember docs, the Ember docs & getting starting guide was way more readable & easier to follow. (also in 2014)

[uremog]

In 2014 when I started using Angular, I could not make heads or tails out of the docs and went stright to 3rd party tutorials. Today, if I know what I need and just need to remember the syntax, I will go to the official docs, but if not, I search elsewhere. I still don't think it's suited for learning.

[wereHamster]

> looking up esoteric lint-errors from the Typescript compiler.

Thought that's a lot better than hunting down bugs in production.

[NikhilVerma]

It's very strange to me, any one of the cons from 3-6 will make me avoid a framework. Do you think the pros of the framework outweigh these serious cons?

[Nemcue]

At the moment? No, I don't think so.

To be brutally honest I think the only reason why this is on HN frontpage is because of its name. It's quite telling that they kept the name despite it being a totally different beast with (imho) an entirely different audience. No way they'd get this much support from the webdev community otherwise.

However I do see the potential, and one should not forget that this is just the first version, straight out of the oven.

Give it some time and I'm sure it will improve.

[bpicolo]

Hard to test, hard to debug, poor documentation? Yeah, sounds like I don't want to be near it.

[_ea1k]

To be fair, outside of testing I have generally found the documentation to be excellent. Also, the debugging tools seem to be pretty nice. In particular, Angular Augury looks amazing: https://augury.angular.io/

However, if you dislike the approach to templating, you will definitely dislike angular. This is one of those things that is controversial, regardless of which approach they had chosen.

[buchanaf]

Solid list. Having just used Angular 2 on a side project, I'd also add that I'm not the biggest fan of passing properties between components. @Input and @Output don't seem particular intuitive nor necessary, but maybe I'm just used to React.

[emodendroket]

I haven't tried ng-2 yet but that does seem like an improvement over ng-1 where AFAIK the best way to do this was to declare some service that directives could depend on.

[clurect]

I felt like I was writing really bad code passing stuff around like this. My project became ugly to look at, even though it worked. This was in February and I'm hoping that either better docs will prevent this from happening to me again or maybe that some changes they made in the 7 months since fixed all that.

I dread to go look at that code...

[lloyd-christmas]

We've converted all our node apps to typescript and I've even started messing around with replacing all our back end promises/callbacks with rxjs.

[krlkv]

You might want to reconsider using RxJS on backend, since it is significantly slower than Bluebird promises (which you should be using instead of native V8 promises at least for now) http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/benchmarks.html

[_ea1k]

The lack of documentation about testing is a major annoyance. I really thought that they would fix that before declaring a final release of 2.0.

[jbigelow76]

RXJS and it's learning curve, not just getting it to work but getting it to work idiomatically has been my biggest struggle with NG2.

[akst]

Well 3 is a preference (as you've indicated), while I have nothing against transpiling I'm not a fan of having a XML DSL in my Javascript. I can't speak for angular, but I much prefer templates along with a build system that bootstraps everything.