Is AngularJS 1 Dead or Is It Still Worth Learning

Is AngularJS 1.x dead or is it still relevant ? Should we learn AngularJS 1.x or should we directly start with AngularJS 2+ ?

Well, these are some of the questions I am facing a lot recently from developers who are interested in or planning to start learning one of the most popular frontend web MVC frameworks of current times - AngularJS. But it is not unusual for new developers or even seasoned professionals to be lost in the aggressive release cycles of AngularJS i.e. one release every year. So, in this article I will try to answer some of those frequently asked questions on the "aliveness" of AngularJS version 1.x

Is AngularJS 1.x dead or is it still relevant?

No, it is certainly not dead, at least not yet, and if you ask me I think it will be relevant even after a couple of years. It will still be living and breathing in at-least some corners of this vast galaxy of internet. These are not my assumptions, but experience. And if you think it through the points I have mentioned below, you will see the reason too. Here are the reasons that will keep AngularJS version 1.x alive for years to come, read on,

Reasons why AngularJS version 1.x is not going to be wiped off of the internet soon

• Investment of Millions of Dollars

  Before I say anything take a look at this snippet from Wikipedia.org According to JavaScript analytics service Libscore, AngularJS is used on the websites of Wolfram Alpha, NBC, Walgreens, Intel, Sprint, ABC News, and about 12,000 other sites out of 1 million tested in October 2016. AngularJS is currently in the top 100 of the most starred projects on GitHub. - Wikipedia.org

  Angular version 1 came out in the year 2010 and version 2 came out some time around 2016. And in this long gap not only AngularJS 1 became popular but developers loved it and everyone wanted their website and web apps to be created or rewritten in this most versatile frontend web MVC framework. As a result millions of dollars all over the world have already been spent on Angular 1. Now, it is not practical or budget friendly for any company to keep hopping on every new framework that keeps surfacing on the internet every now and then. So, bottom line, some of the people are sticking with AngularJS 1 for now and hence, verdict, AngularJS stays.

• Time Will Always Leave Us Behind

  It sounds kind of disheartening but it is true that no matter what we do, we can never win the race against time. And with time, as every second passes by technologies are rapidly upgrading. No matter what technology you choose today and start working on, it will eventually be labeled as outdated once you finish your project or maybe only after a short time of relief. And for big company websites, sometimes this creation or migration takes years to complete and thus the "then new" technology while starting the project ends up being "now old" technology at the end of the project.

  So, keeping in mind the release years of Angular JS 1 (2010) and Angular 2 (2016), let’s consider this very practical scenario:
  In the year 2013, a big and well renowned company, say "ABC Ltd", saw that this new framework Angular JS has gained quite popularity in recent years and gives x, y, z benefits and every competitor is rushing for it. So they decide that they also want to have it in their website. It passes through various levels of approvals, budget allotments, finding and choosing the right vendors and lots of steps which took another one year. Finally, in 2014 developers started working towards the goal of creating an awesome website in Angular JS and estimated time to completion was set to 2 years. In 2016 when the development was complete, time and money were well spent, everyone was rejoicing and partying their achievement and satisfaction, and future plan was only for maintenance, bug fixes and new feature additions to the application, suddenly a grumpy [Draco] Malfoy with very mal-intentions dropped in on his flying broomstick and expressed "Hello retards, in case you haven’t heard, Angular 2 is here. Feel free to trash your "Absolute Awesome" as it is more like "Obsolete Awesomeness" now…" An air of depression was about to prevail but suddenly Johnny Blaze broke in on his fiery motor bike (which sets fire on Malfoy’s broomstick hairs and jets him off), and said "you can't live in fear" [of being outdated]. And people were blissful again with Angular JS 1 and resumed partying.

  Thus Angular JS version 1 survived this round too…

• Stability

  Many people think, for obvious reasons, clearly, that AngularJS 1 is still the most stable version out there and with new versions coming out like almost every day (year actually), people are waiting for another stable release (they are all stable releases, but that’s not what they mean) to come out, which will be going to stick around for a while (like Angular 1 has), without being outdated by next release on the very next day.

• Ease of Use

  According to many of us, AngularJS version 1 is still the easiest one to use. Just drop in the script tag and we are all set up to go, unlike other higher versions where we have to go through a number of steps for setting up the initial boilerplate app.

• Visible Benefits

  Generally people are reluctant to migrate to any new technology or framework until there is really a very strong reason to do so, because migrations not only costs time and money but it can also bring in instability to otherwise perfectly performing app, running smoothly for years and thus cause bad customer experience leading to loss of business and MONEY. With these points in mind, honestly it is very hard to persuade the client why they should spend their money and time and go through all the risks to migrate their stable and functional website from Angular 1 to 5 when there are no visible benefits.

• No Direct Migration Path

  Angular version 2 and above are incompatible with Angular version 1 and thus giving us no direct path of migration and leaving us with no option other than throwing away all the existing code and start writing from scratch. That means almost 100% duplication of effort . Say that to your buyer and they will say, no sir, thanks but we’ll pass.

Should we learn AngularJS 1.x anymore ?

Yeah, of course, why not? For all the reasons I listed above, there will be a lot of legacy (soon to be) applications written in AngularJS 1 running all over the internet and to maintain all those applications there will be need for people who are good at Angular JS 1.x. So, go ahead and learn it today