And to make up for it, they threw in some even worse parts. Like breaking the syntax of HTML with their templates, making it impossible to edit, validate, transform, generate or consume templates with any of the thousands of existing HTML and XML processing tools.
That, in my opinion, was one of the most terrible ideas I've ever heard come out of the Angular community. And even worse, they refuse to acknowledge that it's a bad idea. That's a very bad sign indeed.
Can you specify some of the forthcoming improvements? I want to like Angular, but every time I've actually used it has been a practical and conceptual headache. (Also, the idea that they're creating a new compile-to-JS language seems strange and unnecessary.)
It's TypeScript with the addition of a few key features that are helpful for Angular's design.
Technically, Angular 1.0 also had its own scripting language too. It's kind of inevitable, since Javascript itself is one of the obstacles to making a better web framework.
It's utterly insane. Just as in AngularJS 1.3 they have invented there own expression language which floats around in HTML attributes, thereby eliminating the use of Javascript itself and all it's functional goodness. And worst, the user has to incur the cost of downloading this needless code for the expression language to bootstrap the framework.
Check out examples of using TypeScript with Angular (or DartAngular). Gives you a lot of benefits today. Personally I think Angular is great but React is even better and I will probably use the latter for my next project if I can choose.
