In terms of paying the rent that may have been a wise move - however I continually wonder about the wisdom(/benefits) of using something like Angular in the first place. And while Typescript is great for supplying type information to IDEs for coding assistance and while I like static typing support there is this:
Non-goal: Apply a sound or “provably correct” type system. Instead, strike a balance between correctness and productivity.
Sound’s to me that while being “statically typed”, TypeScript is choosing to be “weakly typed” - i.e. the primary motivation behind TypeScript is to bring in the OO baggage that many Java/C# developer’s are already familiar with.
I spent a significant amount of effort to “skill-up” in Angular 1.x, getting to the point where I started to see the wisdom in “How I’ve Improved My Angular Apps by Banning ng-controller” (Tero Parviainen’s “Build Your Own AngularJS” is a great piece of work btw.). Now Angular 2 fixes a lot of issues but by being an “opinionated framework” it’s “view of the world” is the one-and-only “correct view of the world” and ultimately it still feels way too heavy-weight and too OO (in a Java EE type of way).
In my opinion Angular’s adoption was primarily driven by corporations preferring open source backed by “big names” (i.e. Google - even though this also implied that Google is motivated by it’s own agenda and not really motivated to listen to anybody else) and backend OO developer’s wanting to do front-end development while largely staying away from the browser’s DOM.
The other issue with a heavy-weight framework is the temptation to move actual business-domain-logic into the front-end which architecturally speaking is a “bad idea” (a disconnected, browser-based app is a different kettle of fish). While a UI should remain responsive, it should focus on performing “UI-logic”, not business logic.
Working through jQuery, Angular 1.x, Node.js, React.js, and Elm I’ve become more reluctant to invest in frameworks and favour highly focused, small libraries (which compose well with other highly, focused, small libraries).
So it makes me wonder if @OvermindDL1 is onto something with a “plain JavaScript + Polymer (more generally, web components)” approach; maybe that should become the contemporary equivalent of adopting jQuery in 2006-2008 (unless you are adopting a “compile to JavaScript” language that has more going for it than TypeScript).
