Choosing Angular 1 Over Angular 2
That's right. You're reading this correctly. Angular 1 over Angular 2. Before we make the arguments for why sticking with Angular 1 may be the right choice, it's important to understand the current landscape of Angular.
Angular vs Angular 2: The Current Landscape
Angular 2 was just released in 2016. It is a complete rewrite of Angular 1 and addresses virtually every major pitfall experienced with the original. It does away with things like scopes and directives and takes a more component based approach (versus Angular 1's MVC).
Such improvements have many developers comparing Angular 2 to React.js instead. Forget Angular 1, it's now React we should be competing With it's flux architecture and change detection mechanism, Angular 2 does seem to give the highly regarded React.js a run for its money.
The Real Issue for Angular 1
To make a long story short, those that have come to love Angular 1 are starting to feel a bit forgotten. Not only has the framework been completely rewritten, it's also quickly becoming largely ignored as React.js and Angular 2 fight for the future of front end development. This makes it very hard to continue writing Angular 1, especially with its blatant issues that both aforementioned frameworks seem to have solved.
Don't Give Up On Angular 1
While any Google search on hottest javascript frameworks will tell you why Angular 1 is inferior, there are plenty of reasons to still be using Angular 1. The original Angular has been around since 2010 and is much better documented. Proponents of Angular 1 even argue that Angular 2 is 'too new' still and that not enough documentation exists to make it worth pursuing.
There's also thousands of developers currently using Angular 1. It's not going away anytime soon. Developers have become too familiar with Angular 1 to migrate existing code to a newly written framework. Such a rich community has also produced open source extensions, with thousands of custom modules/directives available for developers to improve existing pitfalls.
Conclusion
Angular 1 remains a perfectly fine option for app development. It's still great for building out SPAs and the major setbacks don't really become problems unless your dealing with thousands of watchers, etc. The dependency injection is still there, and the original framework uses MVC and plain old javascript to reduce the learning curve. It's not going anywhere. This is not to say that Angular 2 or React should be ignored. They still may be the best options moving forward. Just don't get down in the dumps if you're already rolling with Angular 1.
