Angular 2 is having a lot of pushback and challenges, but this may be a positive.<p>First, there have been hard feelings over breaking backward compatibility. To rub salt in the wound the new syntax doesn't seem to buy you much for many basic scenarios. If you are going to push big breaking changes you need to show big benefits that are easy to understand at a glance.<p>Secondly, the Ember community started small but has been kicking ass for a while now and making many improvements that are compelling to developers. It's a modern framework, but also easier to understand than some competitors like react.<p>I see the Typescript move as a positive because it shows they are at least trying to do what's right even when using tech from one of the biggest competitors. How this played internally at Google to overcome executive knee-jerk/bureaucracy/pettiness I don't know, but it's a good sign.<p>The community has clearly spoken, and the future of Angular is now riding on how well they absorb and react to the feedback and advances from competing teams.
"Special shout out to Yehuda Katz, who helped us design the annotation+decorator proposal which helped make this work possible."<p>How in the world does this man keep up with all these projects? He needs to write a book on motivation.
This isn't really a big jump, as they were using AtScript before which was really just a forked TypeScript: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/11YUzC-1d0V1-Q3V0fQ7KSit97HnZoKVygDxpWzEYW0U/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/11YUzC-1d0V1-Q3V0fQ7KSit9...</a><p>They must have convinced Microsoft to accept their patches into mainline TypeScript.
I don't care what people say Angular totally suffers from the second system effect.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect</a>
Yay! I have tested TypeScript in hobby projects with a very positive experience. I have actually used typescript together with angular once. I was very disappointed when angular announced that they were going to make some kind of fork, for the runtime annotations they needed, instead of working together.
So Angular has gone from being written in plain JS, to Dart, to Atscript, and now Typescript? Why so much jumping around? Isn't that creating a lot of technical debt issues?
Wow! That's pretty big news!<p>Very much looking forward to seeing what insights come out of rebuilding something like angular with types.<p><i>edit</i> actually on second reading, I'm not sure what's been rewritten in what?
Looking at the example source code & having experience of AngularJs & TS, I would say this is a huge development in term of enterprise adoption.<p>Statically typed, annotations, built-in dependency injection, comprehensive test support (easy to write testable code), declarative UIs, 100s of already available libraries & above all support from Google and Microsoft. I can say this with confidence that even with a complete rewrite & not backward compatible, AngularJS 2 with TS is going to be a huge success for everyone.<p>And sooner or later, all other frameworks will adopt ECMA Script 6 because of standardisation of so many things (modules, classes etc.)<p>I would also like to add that this is a very exciting time for JavaScript developers because there are so many things happening & companies of all sizes will keep investing good amount of money moderating their JS code bases.
My brain just broke. I can't even imagine Google and Microsoft working together on anything as big as Angular. The Universe just took a 90 degree turn.
"Special shout out to Yehuda Katz, who helped us design the annotation+decorator proposal which helped make this work possible."<p>The feverish Yehuda Katz is everywhere! But most importantly he is here on Hacker News and has close to 6000 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wycats" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wycats</a>
There's clearly a corporate agenda with 2.0 but who cares. The most important question is "Is this the best thing for my scenario?" Probably not but it has a name.<p>There's too much talk about "typescript" and not enought about what problems Angular 2 solves compared to "not" having a ready made framework or how many problems it adds.
Here is a nice introduction video to TypeScript from ng-conf 2015 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7NYTKgkZgo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7NYTKgkZgo</a>
My main feeling about this is not so much about typeScript (which, meh, some syntax sugar I don't care about, and tooltips for an IDE I don't use) -- more it's that just the mere whiff of Microsoft's involvement will be enough to snuff out remaining developer interest in Angular 2.