Intro

I gave this talk in November 2016, I had pretty confidently thrown my hat in the Angular ring rather than the React ring by that point. I still prefer Angular to React. The gist of my talk was that the React ecosystem requires lots of technology decisions and that makes it a poor choice for a first JavaScript framework. I started out trying to learn React before I moved to Angular. I prefered that in Angular there was a defined way to do anything you needed to do rather than any one of 15 different routes in the React ecosystem.

Talk Overview

The talk was based on a blog post I read titled Choosing Ember Over React in 2016. After I read that article, I started thinking about the reasons why I chose Angular 2 over React. One of the main reasons was that every single thing you might need to do in an application requires you to make a technology decision with React. That obviously confers a lot of flexibility for more experienced devs, but for people picking up their first JavaScript framework, it's hard to make those decisisons without having a frame of reference or not knowing what 90% of those technologies do. That problem does not exist in Angular. You do everything the Angular Way ™

Aside from the required technology decisions, there are a few other places where I see Angular taking the advantage:

• TypeScript > JSX
• Angular CLI
• The Angular documentation is better than the React documentation
• Not having to keep up with all the different libraries that do *insert thing here* in React

Angular does have its own set of downsides though:

• There's a large API surface area, so there's lots to learn
• Learning all of the ng-WhatHaveYous
• It can be heavy if you don't use Ahead of Time compilation/Lazy Loading/Tree shaking

Talk Download

You can watch the recording of the talk here:

If you want to take a look at the slides, you can download them here.