10 Years of Angular: Looking back & ahead

00:00:00: Exactly 10 years ago today, which is really

00:00:03: mind-blowing I have to say, was a pretty important day for me because

00:00:07: I released the first version of my Angular course, my Angular 2

00:00:11: course, back then. And just like Angular, this course, of course, has

00:00:15: evolved a lot over those 10 years. It has been updated countless time by

00:00:19: me because, of course, Angular evolved quite a bit.

00:00:22: And in this video, in this episode, I wanna talk a bit about

00:00:26: Angular's past, where we're coming from, where we are today, and of

00:00:30: course, also where we're going and what the future has on hold for

00:00:34: for Angular developers, if it's still a good idea to learn it,

00:00:37: course, now also with AI, and yeah. Let's dive in.

00:00:41: So Angular, Angular 2 specifically, was

00:00:45: announced back in 2014, developed in

00:00:48: 2015, and back then it was pretty

00:00:52: controversial because it was totally different compared to Angular

00:00:56: 1, AngularJS, which itself was one of the

00:01:00: first major frameworks we had back then, which essentially were

00:01:04: created to help us get rid of jQuery or

00:01:07: maybe, to put it in other terms, to be able to build more

00:01:11: capable, uh, web-first applications,

00:01:15: interactive web applications you could say, because it made

00:01:19: building client-side rendered and controlled applications easier,

00:01:23: Angular 1. And then Angular 2 was announced and it was totally

00:01:27: different. And in 2016, the first

00:01:30: stable version of Angular was released, Angular 2 was released, I

00:01:34: mean. And, uh, as I mentioned, in February 2016,

00:01:38: I released the first version of my course, back then for the beta of

00:01:42: Angular 2, and I can tell you, there were a lot of changes still in that beta

00:01:46: phase and still in the release candidate phase even.

00:01:49: I updated the course many, many times back then already

00:01:53: but then we had Angular 2. And the Angular back

00:01:57: then, if you look at modern Angular code, looked quite

00:02:01: different. You had this concept of

00:02:04: NgModules, of Angular modules, where you had these

00:02:07: classes and you had to add this NgModule, uh,

00:02:11: decorator and explicitly declare all the components you

00:02:15: were about to use. And then you had those components,

00:02:19: of course, and you had your component classes, you

00:02:23: had constructor-based dependency injection if you had something to

00:02:27: inject. It was, to some degree, of course, very

00:02:31: similar to how a component looks today.

00:02:33: It's still a class. But then again, i- it was very

00:02:37: different. And especially NgModules are something

00:02:40: you might not really know anymore, depending on when you

00:02:44: started your Angular journey and depending on in

00:02:48: Angular version you were working.

00:02:51: Because there still are many companies and projects out there that are stuck

00:02:55: on older versions, of course. Now in

00:02:57: 2017, we had the missing version 3

00:03:01: because Angular had this release

00:03:04: schedule to this day that every six months

00:03:09: a new major version of Angular would be released and I know,

00:03:13: I remember back then, uh, a lot of people were not happy about that

00:03:16: because it sounded like Angular would break every six months.

00:03:20: I recall lots of, many comments and messages in my course about

00:03:24: people complaining about Angular changing all the time, but it never really

00:03:28: changed all the time. They just had that release schedule to

00:03:32: give them an opportunity of introducing big new

00:03:36: features, but they always did that in a very backwards compatible way,

00:03:40: and well, it's the missing version 3 here in

00:03:43: 2017, uh, because actually initially there were

00:03:47: some version mismatches between the Angular core packages and the

00:03:51: Angular router package, because Angular is a framework that's split up in a

00:03:55: lot of different packages, and they skipped a version,

00:03:58: version 3, to bring them back to the same version

00:04:02: Now then the next big jump probably

00:04:06: was in 2020 with the

00:04:10: introduction of the Ivy compiler, and of course, between

00:04:14: those years here, or in 2018 and so on, the Angular

00:04:18: team was heavy at work, uh, working on that new compiler,

00:04:22: along with many other small tweaks and improvements.

00:04:25: And the idea behind that compiler was to really rewrite the

00:04:29: internals of Angular and how components are compiled and

00:04:33: translated to actual instructions that manipulate the

00:04:36: DOM, because the old compiler had some

00:04:40: some problems, led to unnecessarily large bundle sizes,

00:04:44: so that's why they had this huge project to

00:04:48: rewrite that internal compiler. Now why is that

00:04:51: important? It is important because this

00:04:55: phase could be referred to as the boring phase.

00:04:59: From 2017 to 2022, uh, to

00:05:03: 2020, not a lot changed. A lot

00:05:07: changed internally and there were minor tweaks, but the core

00:05:11: feature set, how you build Angular components

00:05:15: didn't change a lot. Why is that important?

00:05:18: Because this was also the time when there was lots of

00:05:21: competition in the JavaScript framework market, of course, if you wanna call

00:05:25: it like this. We had the release of Vue.js

00:05:29: 2 in 2016. We had a

00:05:33: lot of development in the React ecosystem and the React world.

00:05:37: I mean, in 2018, React Hooks were introduced.

00:05:41: So it felt like the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem

00:05:44: was evolving rapidly and not everybody liked

00:05:48: that, to be clear. Angular felt stagnant, and that

00:05:52: is maybe not as bad as it sounds. Um, of course a

00:05:56: lot of people valued that stability because again, there were

00:06:00: many complaints about everything changing all the time in

00:06:04: the JavaScript ecosystem, which of course feels kind of like a joke

00:06:08: look at today and all the AI-driven evolution and the

00:06:11: constant change with AI we see almost every day.

00:06:14: But yeah, that was back then what people complained

00:06:18: That was the boring phase. Now, that boring phase

00:06:22: stopped or came to an end around 2022 when

00:06:26: with Angular 14, standalone components were

00:06:29: introduced in developer preview back then, I think.

00:06:33: And the idea here was that all of a sudden you didn't

00:06:36: need, um, Angular modules

00:06:39: anymore. Instead, you could add this

00:06:42: standalone flag to your component and then you would be able to

00:06:46: use that component in other components without ng

00:06:50: modules, so without this stuff. You could still

00:06:54: use ng modules. You could use them together with

00:06:58: You could mix and match as needed because again, backwards

00:07:01: compatibility and giving people an easy migration path was

00:07:05: always important to the Angular team, but you didn't

00:07:09: have to. So that were standalone components and

00:07:13: that was then rapidly followed up in 2023 with

00:07:16: Angular 16 with Signals and many more

00:07:20: features. Many more features like a different way of

00:07:24: rendering content conditionally with @if instead of the

00:07:28: ngIf directive. And also, there were

00:07:32: first experiments being made into zoneless Angular.

00:07:35: And in case you don't know, uh, Angular, when it was released,

00:07:39: Angular 2, used a concept called ngZone or

00:07:42: Zone.js, which was essentially a library

00:07:46: kinds of events that could occur on a website like

00:07:50: clicks and HTTP requests, uh, being

00:07:54: sent and, and many other things. And it would then basically run change

00:07:58: detection to see if the DOM needs to be updated in response to

00:08:02: any of these events. The advantage of this approach was

00:08:05: updates felt magical. Unlike with React, you didn't have to

00:08:09: call setState or anything like that.

00:08:12: But the disadvantage, of course, was that you had this monkey

00:08:15: patching where, uh, a library would inject event listeners to

00:08:19: kinds of events with all the overhead that meant, with all the additional bundle

00:08:23: size that meant, and therefore, it was

00:08:27: also less efficient than React's mechanism, for example.

00:08:31: And zoneless, therefore, was another big step forward which

00:08:35: was enabled by Signals because the idea behind Signals was that now all of a

00:08:39: sudden you had an explicit way of telling Angular

00:08:43: that some state changed and it was able to remember

00:08:47: where that state in the DOM was being used and it was then able to

00:08:50: update just that part of the DOM. So that

00:08:53: fine-grained reactivity was introduced to Angular in

00:08:58: 2023. And therefore, that is

00:09:01: something that was and still is often called the Angular

00:09:05: Renaissance. After the boring phase and

00:09:09: after the kind of chaotic initial days with all

00:09:13: those breaking changes compared to Angular 1,

00:09:16: Angular saw lots of love from the community

00:09:20: again because they were making big

00:09:23: steps into a future that made Angular

00:09:27: leaner, easier to use to some degree and brought it

00:09:31: more in line, uh, with what people saw in some of the other

00:09:34: frameworks out there. Signals, for example, were made popular

00:09:38: by SolidJS but were actually, I think...

00:09:42: Uh, one of the first major frameworks to use

00:09:45: They just didn't call it Signals, but Refs.

00:09:49: Anyways, that was, uh, where Angular

00:09:53: was heading. And now for 2026

00:09:56: and the future, uh, we'll, of course, see more development

00:10:00: there. We'll see Signal Forms. The Angular team

00:10:04: also, of course, is embracing AI with an MCP server

00:10:08: that's built into the CLI to make AI power

00:10:11: development on Angular apps easier, to make AI aware of all

00:10:15: those Angular features. And therefore, it's a story

00:10:19: of a framework that has actually been pretty

00:10:23: stable and backwards compatible throughout its entire

00:10:27: lifetime despite reinventing itself at

00:10:30: least once, maybe even multiple times depending on how

00:10:34: it. It's been super stable and backwards compatible, uh,

00:10:38: and I think the Angular team- team did a great job there.

00:10:42: And they were able to really, I think, change the image, uh,

00:10:46: of Angular at least a bit from a framework that felt pretty

00:10:50: heavy and maybe hard to learn to a more

00:10:53: modern framework Now one thing Angular has always been, by the way,

00:10:57: is a batteries included framework where you would

00:11:01: have things like form handling, routing, HTTP

00:11:05: requests, dependency injection, uh, state management

00:11:09: across components. You had that all built into the framework.

00:11:12: You didn't need to reach for third-party libraries here unlike

00:11:16: with React where you had to bring in a third-party router, you

00:11:20: had to bring in a third-party state management library and so on.

00:11:24: So that, of course, is also something many companies value.

00:11:27: Therefore, Angular has seen steady growth

00:11:31: over all those last 10 years if you take a look at

00:11:35: its growth curve, but of course, part of the truth

00:11:39: is also that React has seen

00:11:43: much more growth. I mean, if you add the React curve

00:11:46: here, the Angular one is barely

00:11:50: visible. And especially since, uh, early

00:11:53: 2025, React took off and we all know why, of

00:11:56: course. That is because of AI. Because AI, and I've

00:12:00: said it many times before in other videos, has one clear favorite and that is

00:12:04: React with Next.js and Tailwind and

00:12:08: not Angular. Does that mean though that Angular is dead

00:12:12: or that you should not learn Angular anymore?

00:12:15: And what does the future of Angular in general look like with

00:12:19: AI being thereWell, Angular to this

00:12:23: day is still being used by many big enterprises because of-

00:12:27: especially because of all that stability, that constant backwards

00:12:30: compatibility that has not just been talked

00:12:34: about, but that has been proven. Because of the

00:12:37: batteries-included approach, Angular is popular in

00:12:41: many big companies. Of course, React, just to be very clear,

00:12:45: is popular in many big companies as well, but

00:12:48: the Angular download numbers don't necessarily

00:12:52: reflect the actual usage or popularity

00:12:56: Angular has, especially amongst enterprises accurately

00:13:00: and I can tell you, uh, from that course here, this

00:13:03: course has 850,000 learners and

00:13:07: that puts it not far behind my React course on

00:13:12: Udemy. Now, of course, there also are more React courses on

00:13:15: Udemy or- or more bigger React courses on Udemy than

00:13:19: are Angular courses, but nonetheless, my experience

00:13:23: has not been the one that you could, uh,

00:13:27: derive from just these charts. I have always seen

00:13:31: that especially business customers are learning Angular

00:13:34: a lot too and that, of course, therefore makes it still to

00:13:38: this day a great choice for building web

00:13:42: applications, modern web applications, and it is very modern

00:13:46: thanks to the Angular renaissance and all the features that are still being

00:13:50: planned. Of course, the thing to consider is

00:13:54: AI and AI is changing, of course,

00:13:58: how we build programs, how we write code.

00:14:01: We write less code. I write less code at least.

00:14:04: I use tools like Cloud Code or Cursor for which I

00:14:08: also have courses by the way. They're all linked below the video

00:14:11: join them. We write code, we build programs

00:14:15: differently, but, of course, our technology choices still

00:14:19: matter. We still want to use technologies that

00:14:22: maintained, that get security updates, that get some new

00:14:26: features that make them more efficient or that, uh, lead

00:14:30: to better performance or that enable new use

00:14:34: cases that maybe then don't require third party libraries anymore.

00:14:37: We still want to use technologies like this and when it comes to that,

00:14:42: Angular, of course, still is a decent, an excellent choice,

00:14:46: just like React is, to be very clear here.

00:14:48: And of course, before I get the comments, yes, Vue and

00:14:53: Svelte, they're all amazing too. This video, as you maybe noticed by

00:14:57: looking at the video title, uh, and thumbnail, is about Angular

00:15:00: though. So yes, it still is a great choice and yes, AI knows

00:15:04: how to write Angular code, especially if you give it the right context, which

00:15:08: you always have to do no matter what you're building with which

00:15:12: technology. And therefore, I think Angular is well

00:15:15: positioned for this AI part future.

00:15:18: If you believe that in three years or so nobody's going to write

00:15:22: any code anymore anyways and therefore technology choices don't

00:15:26: matter anymore, things will be different, of course, for you.

00:15:30: That is not my belief though. From what I see, from my day-to-day

00:15:34: usage with AI where I'm heavily using it and where most of my code is

00:15:38: generated by AI, I can tell you controlling it,

00:15:41: steering it, making choices, choosing technologies,

00:15:45: choosing, uh, software architectures is more important than

00:15:49: ever and yeah, Angular is still a great choice

00:15:52: there. So that was my short history on Angular,

00:15:56: will always have a special place in my heart because as I

00:15:59: mentioned, this was the first major course at

00:16:03: least that I released on Udemy and it has changed a lot for

00:16:07: me. It allowed me to create courses for a

00:16:11: living. It has changed the lives and careers of countless

00:16:14: people. I got so many awesome messages and feedback and

00:16:17: therefore, yeah, Angular always was amazing and it's

00:16:21: especially amazing for me