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Why the Deprecation of Flex-Layouts Is Concerning for Angular Developers
A lot of refactoring is just on the horizon
Being an Angular developer is largely an enjoyable experience. You get excellent functionality, like writing your app in TypeScript and other first-party components like Angular Material. Sometimes, some niggles, like design choices you don’t quite “get” or documentation that doesn’t quite make sense. That’s true for any framework, though, and not a valid case against Angular itself.
Whether you use Angular or React Native (or even vanilla JavaScript) to write your apps, you are essentially led to one of these solutions because of what you’re after in a library. In the case of Angular, I chose it because of type safety and because I feel like it is a strongly opinionated library (more than React Native, anyway). Some developers balk at strong opinions, instead preferring to do things entirely their own way. That’s not me — I’m happy to be led by the design decisions around Angular to create and produce web apps.
But that’s not to say that all of those design decisions make sense or are easy to get along with. When viewed from the perspective that we all pay zero dollars to use Angular, it’s easy to rejoice in adding useful features. An excellent example of this is the recent addition of strongly typed forms. This was the most requested improvement to Angular and immediately made working with Forms and FormGroups much more enjoyable.
As an Angular developer, receiving these quality-of-life updates is nice, as it feels like the framework enters a new stage of maturity. Polishing existing features, and dialing those features in, is well-received across any developer community, especially in the Angular community. It also speaks to the good decision-making within the Angular team, as making forms strongly typed is objectively the “right” thing to do (as opposed to chasing some other shiny feature that gets half-implemented, ignoring other more important things within Angular itself).
Polishing existing features, and dialing those features in, is well-received across any developer community, especially so in the Angular community.
