How Google fumbled the frontend with Angular 2

A cartoon from an ex-Google software engineer, titled “Welcome to Google,” made the rounds a while back. It featured two diverging roads, neither passable. One was the main road, marked as deprecated (“don’t even think about it,” the sign read). The new road, however, was marked as still under construction (“Danger”), and so was unusable as well.

That was the no-win choice two million frontend developers faced in 2014, when Google unexpectedly deprecated its popular JavaScript framework, AngularJS, in favor of Angular 2, which had a radically different architecture, a confusing name, no upgrade path, and wasn’t even fully released yet.

So, many developers turned the wheel and headed to Reactville or Vuetown instead.

How Google botched the Angular upgrade provides timely lessons in how not to update a software package, which former Google Developer Advocate Stephen Fluin outlined in a talk at the All Things Open conference last week.

“Uncertainty kills motivation,” said Fluin. …