00:00:00exactly 10 years ago today, which is really mind blowing I have to say, was a pretty important
00:00:06day for me because I released the first version of my Angular course, my Angular 2 course back
00:00:12then. And just like Angular, this course of course has evolved a lot over those 10 years,
00:00:17it has been updated countless times by me because of course Angular evolved quite a bit. And
00:00:23in this video, in this episode, I wanna talk a bit about Angular's past, where we're
00:00:28coming from, where we are today and of course also where we're going and what the future
00:00:32has in hold for Angular, for Angular developers, if it's still a good idea to learn it, especially
00:00:37of course now also with AI and yeah, let's dive in. So Angular, Angular 2 specifically
00:00:44was announced back in 2014, developed in 2015 and back then it was pretty controversial
00:00:53because it was totally different compared to Angular 1, AngularJS, which itself was one
00:00:59of the first major frameworks we had back then, which essentially were created to help us
00:01:05get rid of jQuery or maybe to put it in other terms, to be able to build more capable web
00:01:13first applications, interactive web applications, you could say, because it made building client
00:01:20side rendered and controlled applications easier, Angular 1. And then Angular 2 was announced
00:01:25and it was totally different. And in 2016, the first stable version of Angular was released,
00:01:33Angular 2 was released, I mean. And as I mentioned, in February 2016, I released the first version
00:01:40of my course back then for the beta of Angular 2. And I can tell you there were a lot of changes
00:01:45still in that beta phase and still in the release candidate phase, even I updated the course
00:01:51many, many times back then already. But then we had Angular 2. And the Angular back then,
00:01:58if you look at modern Angular code looked quite different. You had this concept of ng modules
00:02:05of Angular modules where you had these classes and you had to add this ng module decorator
00:02:12and explicitly declare all the components you were about to use. And then you had those components,
00:02:19of course, and you had your component classes, you had constructor based dependency injection.
00:02:26If you had something to inject, it was to some degree, of course, very similar to how a component
00:02:32looks today. It's still a class. But then again, it was very different. And especially ng modules
00:02:39are something you might not really know anymore, depending on when you started your Angular
00:02:45journey and depending on in which company with which Angular version you were working. Because
00:02:51there still are many companies and projects out there that are stuck on older versions,
00:02:55of course. Now, in 2017, we had the missing version three, because Angular had this release
00:03:04schedule to this day that every six months, a new major version of Angular would be released.
00:03:11And I know, I remember back then, a lot of people were not happy about that, because it
00:03:17sounded like Angular would break every six months. I recall lots of many comments and
00:03:23messages in my course about people complaining about Angular changing all the time, but it
00:03:27never really changed all the time. They just had that release schedule to give them an opportunity
00:03:33of introducing big new features. But they always did that in a very backwards compatible
00:03:40way. And well, it's the missing version three here in 2017. Because actually, initially,
00:03:46there were some version mismatches between the Angular core packages and the Angular router
00:03:51package because Angular is a framework that's split up in a lot of different packages. And
00:03:57they skipped a version, version three, to bring them back to the same version number. Now,
00:04:03then the next big jump probably was in 2020 with the introduction of the Ivy compiler.
00:04:12And of course, between those years here, or in 2018 and so on, the Angular team was heavy
00:04:19at work working on that new compiler, along with many other small tweaks and improvements.
00:04:25But the idea behind that compiler was to really rewrite the internals of Angular and how components
00:04:31are compiled and translated to actual instructions that manipulate the DOM. Because the old compiler
00:04:38had some inefficiencies, some problems led to unnecessarily large bundle sizes. So that's
00:04:44why they had this huge project to rewrite that internal compiler. Now, why is that important?
00:04:52It is important because this phase could be referred to as the boring phase. From 2017
00:05:01to 2020, not a lot changed. A lot changed internally, and there were minor tweaks. But
00:05:10the core feature set, how you build Angular components and so on, didn't change a lot.
00:05:16Why is that important? Because this was also the time when there was lots of competition
00:05:22in the JavaScript framework market, of course, if you want to call it like this. We had the
00:05:27release of Vue.js 2 in 2016. We had a lot of development in the React ecosystem and the
00:05:36React world. I mean, in 2018, React hooks were introduced. So it felt like the rest of the
00:05:43JavaScript ecosystem was evolving rapidly, and not everybody liked it. To be clear, Angular
00:05:50felt stagnant. And that is maybe not as bad as it sounds. Of course, a lot of people valued
00:05:57that stability because again, there were many complaints about everything changing all the
00:06:03time in the JavaScript ecosystem, which of course feels kind of like a joke if we take
00:06:08a look at today and all the AI driven evolution and the constant change with AI we see almost
00:06:13every day. But yeah, that was back then what people complained about. That was the boring
00:06:19phase. Now that boring phase stopped or came to an end around 2022 when with Angular 14
00:06:28standalone components were introduced in developer preview back then, I think. And the idea here
00:06:33was that all of a sudden you didn't need Angular modules anymore. Instead, you could add this
00:06:42standalone flag to your component and then you would be able to use that component in
00:06:47other components without ng-modules. So without this stuff, you could still use ng-modules.
00:06:55You could use them together with standalone components. You could mix and match as needed
00:07:00because again, backwards compatibility and giving people an easy migration path was always
00:07:05important to the Angular team, but you didn't have to. So that were standalone components
00:07:12and that was then rapidly followed up in 2023 with Angular 16 with signals and many more
00:07:20features. Many more features like a different way of rendering content conditionally with
00:07:26@if instead of the ng-if directive. And also there were first experiments being made into
00:07:34zoneless Angular. And in case you don't know, Angular when it was released, Angular 2, used
00:07:40a concept called ng-zone or zone.js, which was essentially a library that listened for
00:07:46all kinds of events that could occur on a website like clicks and HTTP requests being sent and
00:07:54many other things. And it would then basically run change detection to see if the DOM needs
00:08:00to be updated in response to any of these events. The advantage of this approach was that DOM
00:08:05updates felt magical. Unlike with React, you didn't have to call set state or anything like
00:08:11that. But the disadvantage, of course, was that you had this monkey patching where a library
00:08:17would inject event listeners to all kinds of events with all the overhead that meant with
00:08:22all the additional bundle size that meant. And therefore it was also less efficient than
00:08:28React's mechanism, for example. And zoneless, therefore, was another big step forward, which
00:08:35was enabled by signals because the idea behind signals was that now all of a sudden you had
00:08:40an explicit way of telling Angular that some state changed. And it was able to remember
00:08:46where that state in the DOM was being used. And it was then able to update just that part
00:08:52of the DOM. So that fine grained reactivity was introduced to Angular in 2023. And therefore
00:09:01that is something that was and still is often called the Angular Renaissance. After the boring
00:09:08phase and after the kind of chaotic initial days with all those breaking changes compared
00:09:15to Angular 1, Angular saw lots of love from the community again because they were making
00:09:23big steps into a future that made Angular leaner, easier to use to some degree and brought it
00:09:30more in line with what people saw in some of the other frameworks out there. Signals,
00:09:36for example, were made popular by SolidJS, but were actually, I think, one of the first
00:09:43major frameworks to use them was Vue. They just didn't call it signals, but refs. Anyways,
00:09:50that was where Angular was heading. And now for 2026 and the future, we'll of course see
00:09:59more development there. We'll see signal forms. The Angular team also, of course, is embracing
00:10:06AI with an MCP server that's built into the CLI to make AI-powered development on Angular
00:10:13apps easier, to make AI aware of all those Angular features. And therefore it's a story
00:10:19of a framework that has actually been pretty stable and backwards compatible throughout
00:10:26its entire lifetime, despite reinventing itself at least once, maybe even multiple times, depending
00:10:33on how you look at it. It's been super stable and backwards compatible. And I think the Angular
00:10:39team did a great job there and they were able to really, I think, change the image of Angular
00:10:46at least a bit from a framework that felt pretty heavy and maybe hard to learn to a more modern
00:10:54framework. Now, one thing Angular has always been, by the way, is a batteries included
00:10:59framework where you would have things like form handling, routing, HTTP requests, dependency
00:11:06injection, state management across components. You had that all built into the framework.
00:11:12You didn't need to reach for third party libraries here, unlike with React where you had to bring
00:11:18in a third party router. You had to bring in a third party state management library and
00:11:23so on. So that, of course, is also something many companies value. Therefore, Angular has
00:11:29seen steady growth over all those last 10 years, if you take a look at its growth curve. But
00:11:37of course, part of the truth is also that React has seen much more growth. I mean, if you add
00:11:45the React curve here, the Angular one is barely visible. And especially since early 2025 React
00:11:54took off and we all know why, of course, that is because of AI. Because AI, and I've said
00:12:00it many times before in other videos, has one clear favorite and that is React with Next.js
00:12:06and Tailwind and not Angular. Does that mean, though, that Angular is dead or that you should
00:12:13not learn Angular anymore? And what does the future of Angular in general look like with
00:12:18AI being there? Well, Angular to this day is still being used by many big enterprises, especially
00:12:27because of all that stability, that constant backwards compatibility that has not just been
00:12:34talked about, but that has been proven. Because of the batteries included approach, Angular
00:12:40is popular in many big companies. Of course, React, just to be very clear, is popular in
00:12:46many big companies as well, but the Angular download numbers don't necessarily reflect
00:12:53the actual usage or popularity Angular has, especially amongst enterprises accurately.
00:13:00And I can tell you from that course here, this course has 850,000 learners. And that puts
00:13:08it not far behind my React course on Udemy. Now of course, there also are more React courses
00:13:15on Udemy or more bigger React courses on Udemy than there are Angular courses. But nonetheless,
00:13:22my experience has not been the one that you could derive from just these charts. I have
00:13:29always seen that especially business customers are learning Angular a lot too. And that of
00:13:36course therefore makes it still, to this day, a great choice for building web applications,
00:13:43modern web applications. And it is very modern, thanks to the Angular Renaissance and all the
00:13:48features that are still being planned. Of course, the thing to consider is AI. And AI is changing,
00:13:57of course, how we build programs, how we write code. We write less code. I write less code
00:14:04at least. I use tools like ClotCode or Cursor, for which I also have courses, by the way.
00:14:09They're all linked below the video if you want to join them. We write code, we build
00:14:14programs differently. But of course, our technology choices still matter. We still want to use
00:14:21technologies that are well maintained, that get security updates, that get some new features
00:14:27that make them more efficient or that lead to better performance or that enable new use
00:14:34cases that maybe then don't require third-party libraries anymore. We still want to use technologies
00:14:40like this. And when it comes to that, Angular, of course, still is a decent and excellent
00:14:45choice, just like React is, to be very clear here. And of course, before I get the comments,
00:14:51yes, Vue and Svelte, they're all amazing, too. This video, as you maybe noticed by looking
00:14:57at the video title and thumbnail, is about Angular, though. So yes, it still is a great
00:15:02choice. And yes, AI knows how to write Angular code, especially if you give it the right context,
00:15:08which you always have to do no matter what you're building with which technology. And
00:15:13therefore, I think Angular is well positioned for this AI-powered future. If you believe
00:15:19that in three years or so, nobody's going to write any code anymore anyways, and therefore
00:15:25technology choices don't matter anymore, things will be different, of course, for you. That
00:15:30is not my belief, though. From what I see, from my day-to-day usage with AI, where I'm
00:15:35heavily using it and where most of my code is generated by AI, I can tell you controlling
00:15:41it, steering it, making choices, choosing technologies, choosing software architectures is more important
00:15:48than ever. And yeah, Angular is still a great choice there. So that was my short history
00:15:54on Angular, a framework that will always have a special place in my heart. Because as I mentioned,
00:16:00this was the first major course at least that I released on Udemy. And it has changed a lot
00:16:07for me. It allowed me to create courses for a living. It has changed the lives and careers
00:16:13of countless people. I got so many awesome messages and feedback. And therefore, yeah,
00:16:19Angular always was amazing. And it's especially amazing for me.