Opinionated frameworks have their benefits. If you're working in their chosen domain, they're often pretty cheap to use. And for some teams, it's especially handy to have plenty of opinions baked in to minimize arguments over every goddamn thing.
When he wrote, "Many front-enders, on the other hand, who have worked with JavaScript and browsers for years and have developed their own coding style, tend to have their doubts about Angular," my thought was, "Oh god, imagine a team of 10 of those people."
I too have developed many style preferences over the years, but long ago I learned they don't matter nearly as much for project success as having a common style.
Exactly yhis is the point PPK is missing imo. A generic structure is offered by Angular, versus the mismatch of libraries, plugins, templating engines (all with their own bugs) that we had before.
I've built a lot of HTML5 over the years, and handing over projects that include your personal preferences and nifty things (even if it's 'Object Oriented' Mootools) can make another developer that has no prior knowledge of it decide to throw everything away and start from scratch.
At least angular provides a standardized and documented way of doing everything.
When he wrote, "Many front-enders, on the other hand, who have worked with JavaScript and browsers for years and have developed their own coding style, tend to have their doubts about Angular," my thought was, "Oh god, imagine a team of 10 of those people."
I too have developed many style preferences over the years, but long ago I learned they don't matter nearly as much for project success as having a common style.