I’m currently looking at angular docs to try and get up to speed because I will be working on an angular project soon.

And I’m known to be unbelievably biased against heavy frameworks, so I might be triggered easily. And I’ve seen plenty of design flaws in angular already, just from a few hours of perusing docs. But what really tipped me over the edge was template expression syntax:

import { Component } from "@angular/core";

@Component({
  selector: "app-input-only",
  standalone: true,
  template: `
    <input
      [value]="value"
      (input)="value = $event.target.value"
      placeholder="Type something…"
    />
  `,
})
export class MyComponent {
  value = "";
}

Ugh. You design a shitty framework, run into shitty poblems (naturally), which you patch with even shittier solutions. It’s the circle of life.

Did someone actually sit down and think: You know what?

Let’s put a DSL (value = $event.target.value) inside a DSL ((input)="..."), inside JavaScript.

Like, that is the cleanest solution to frontend. One more DSL will solve all our problems. Please bro. Just one more layer of indirection bro.

I guess there’s a reason why react has 10x the amount of downloads on npm (and it’s not because react users are not “enterprise” enough)

But yeah. Yikes man.

It immediately reminded me of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule from the early 90s:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Good to see that the industry has learned.

---

I mean please read through that thing. Why would you want to use javascript when you could use a buggy version of it with less features and 20 exceptions you have to memorize?

• “Yeah expressions are based on javascript but they are not”
• “Yeah we have globals from javascript but just two. We also have ‘special’ variables instead”
• “Yeah we support assignment but not in expressions. But also we have ‘statements’ that are not expressions but we’re describing them on this page anyway. They can do assignment, but also not destructuring assignment.”
• “Yeah we have an optional chaining operator but it behaves differently from the standard”