Tech Duels Angular vs. React Debate: Recap
On Tuesday May 9th, Tech Duels held their first React vs. Angular debate, organized by EventzIn. Checkmate developer Michael Solati was on team Angular, defending the framework with Ryan Provost, while Chad Marciniak and Drew Bourne formed Team React.
Team React centered their case on the accessibility and ease of use of the Facebook-created framework. According to Team React debater Chad Marciniak, “The philosophy of React emphasizes simplicity, modularity, and composition.” His teammate Drew Bourne argued that, even though there are very relatively few React developers right now, most JavaScript developers should have an easy time picking it up. “React is just JavaScript. The more JavaScript you know, the better you are at React.”
In most of their arguments, Team Angular focused on the much greater prevalence of the framework. “I want to make sure that what I specialize in isn’t a novelty,” said Ryan Provost, appealing to a career-focused practicality. “There aren’t many job opportunities for novelty products.” Michael Solati pointed out that Angular’s wide usage has resulted in useful standardization. “In Angular, because we have standards, anyone can come into any project and contribute meaningful code right away,” he said, rebutting the idea that Angular was more difficult to work with than React.
Throughout the debate, a thread of millennial use vs. enterprise use emerged, with Team React’s Drew Bourne claiming React as an inherently millennial-friendly framework. “React was created by millennials to build apps for millennials. And you know what’s cool? Millennials. Angular was built by an enterprise for enterprise. And you know what’s not cool? Enterprise.” Team Angular responded by pointing out that the framework’s use in enterprise applications is an indication of its quality and staying power.
The teams also found some common ground, generally agreeing that both frameworks are well-suited to support legacy browsers like IE 9 and that both are clearly preferable to older frameworks which have fallen out of common use.
The full debate, including the announcement of the winner, can be viewed here.
