Not at all! Honestly there are some WONDERFUL things about angular. There are some bad ones too.
- Polling for changes vs. event driven
- two way data bindings causing infinite redraw loops.
- "feels like O(n^2)" performance on ng-repeats / large pages
but things like the templating, directives, data-binding... they are all really good things.
And dependency injection! They have really moved the needle forward on client side testing.
No angular in itself is not a mistake at all. There are mistakes without question. I suspect the angular 2.0 release will address many of the major criticisms. Though, I haven't read much about it yet.
ng-if, ng-switch, ng-repeat? There's already a language in the browser that does these things, it's called JavaScript.
Why do you even need dependency injection and singleton services and factories in a dynamic language with closures and first-class functions? You don't. Client-side testing works fine without DI. Angular is just a way to do Java in JavaScript. It's a pile of unnecessary complexity designed to sell to enterprises that love over-designed Java projects and want to make client-side development feel more similar to what they know. In that regard I suppose Angular is a little better than Google Web Toolkit, but that isn't saying much.
> Hasn't every template language in the world has come to a similar conclusion?
No, not even every mainstream template language. For example, I still use ERB and EJS extensively, and so do many other engineers. ERB and EJS use the control flow constructs of the underlying languages (Ruby and JS, respectively).
There is of course debate about whether templates should expose the full power of a programming language. I have tried templating languages that do and ones that don't. For now, I'm sticking with templates that let me mix in arbitrary code as I see fit. Could I abuse that power and make a mess? Absolutely. But I try not to, and my code stays pretty maintainable.
The overarching problem here is herd mentality. Using Angular is a bad idea, but lots of companies are using it anyway because The Herd stampeded towards the new shiny thing, mostly because of how cool two-way binding looked in Angular's demo toy app.
Now all those companies are bogged down by Angular, but feel like ejecting it would be too costly. Elsewhere, lots of new developers are introduced to Angular and invest time and effort into learning it because they don't know any better.
Herd mentality is a big problem. It's basically the polar opposite of thinking for yourself, and as such, extremely detrimental in other aspects too.
The couple of times I've worked with angular, some things went incredibly smoothly, and when you hit those edges, it really reminded me of ASP.Net 1.0, it was nice for about 80% of your workload, but the other 20% took 10x the effort, and was a much bigger headache to work around.
Honestly, if/when browsers have better support, I think something closer to Polymer may be the best of all worlds with web development... for now, I find that React code tends to be the most sensible (with a decent framework around it)... not to mention shared client-server code with node/io.js
I can make functional prototypes very, very quickly with angular. There are things it does not do well, in my opinion, but it has given me a tool that previously didn't exist in the JS world.
I don't care about the turing completeness of angular.
If Angular has produced a local optima of efficiency in the range of "misguided attempts" then it's effect on the development ecosystem was a net positive.
That said, I am extremely concerned that most popular frameworks/libraries are products of megacorps.
That is in part due to the complexity of problems in frontend and that most companies don't need to solve those problems (or don't have the resources to solve them).
I think a more important reason would be that Facebook/Microsoft/Google media influence and corporate support creates massive brand awareness and generates instant interest. Educational projects anticipate the interest from developers and create courses, tutorials and reviews. The cycle continues and bam! we have an information cascade[0].
Rich get richer and poorer get poorer (in developer mindshare). Megacorps reap the benefits while indie developers are not able to achieve critical mass.
I shudder when I think about the possible Typescript/Microsoft, Angular/Google, React/Facebook domination in web technologies.
I do, primarily because it's yet another attempt in a long history of misguided attempts to bestow Turing completeness on XML.