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up vote 106 down vote favorite
6

As noted here and discussed here, Google has decided to drop the "2" from and refer to it simply as Angular instead, for the (very good) reason that "Angular 2" will be Angular 4 by January and Angular 6 by the end of next year.

(For those who are unfamiliar, is the successor to and was a complete rewrite of the platform targeting a new set of languages, so their tags are applicable to mutually exclusive sets of questions.)

So is now Angular, but is currently a synonym for , where questions expressly do not belong.

What do we do about this?

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How about replacing angularjs with angular1? Most people know of AngularJS 1.4, AngularJS 1.5, etc. – camden_kid yesterday
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I'm reminded of these They Might be Giants lyrics "Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. Been a long time gone, Constantinople. Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night." – icc97 yesterday
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Nonsense like this is why Google Chrome is currently at version 55, rendering version numbers effectively meaningless. – Cody Gray yesterday
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@CodyGray Ironically, this issue arose because version numbers do have meaning now (i.e. it's due to their shift to semantic versioning) – drewmoore yesterday
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They have implemented semantic versioning in about the dumbest, most meaningless way possible. They concede that incrementing the major version should indicate breaking incompatible changes, but then go on to say that this will not be relevant to most software developers, and so can be ignored. Anyway, according to that article, one of their three guidelines is "Use “Angular 1”, “Angular 2”, “Angular 4” when talking about a specific release train". This suggests that obliterating version-specific tags entirely may not be the correct course of action. – Cody Gray yesterday
    
@CodyGray "They concede that incrementing the major version should indicate breaking incompatible changes, but then go on to say that this will not be relevant to most software developers, and so can be ignored." which is why I believe that doing any sort of [angular-version] tags is absurd. – Braiam 17 hours ago
up vote 50 down vote

I vote for renaming to , retagging all current questions with and finally renaming to .

It'd be a lot of work but it seems like it'd be the most accurate.

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I think this is inline with their guidance as well. "Basically from now on, name all versions of Angular simply “Angular”. Try to avoid using the version number, unless it is really necessary to disambiguate." – Travis J 2 days ago
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Their guidance makes no sense because as long as people still using angular1, the version number is always necessary. – Bryan Chen 2 days ago
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@BryanChen Yes, and there are many large systems written in angular1 that are defintely not going to be rewritten in angular2 anytime soon. – DanM 2 days ago
    
And who cares but the developers that still maintain them @DanM? You will have almost no new questions (aka. not-dupes) about older platforms, meanwhile newer asker can't get confused. – Braiam 2 days ago
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@Braiam: I see a decline in questions about Angular 1.x, but not a sudden stop. – Makoto 2 days ago
    
@Makoto numbers or didn't happen. – Braiam 2 days ago
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On other news, the [angular-1.x] tag has the amazing number of just 3 questions. – Braiam 2 days ago
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@Braiam: I'm referring to the future. Due to people still using Angular 1.x, I still see questions coming in. Even with Angular 2.x advancing, there are still going to be people that don't stop with it. – Makoto 2 days ago
    
@Makoto are those questions "novel"? One would expect that after 5 years of use, people would run out of new problems to ask about.... and they still have new features (!!) so, ignore me... – Braiam 2 days ago
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@Braiam "maintain" is the wrong word to use. If you're dealing with a large, complex system, and there's no time/budget/inclination/will to port the whole thing to Angular 2, that doesn't mean you're going to stop building new features. – DanM 2 days ago
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@DanM every problem you can find with an old enough framework, was already found by someone else. – Braiam 2 days ago
    
@Braiam this process is independent on whether a new version of the framework exsists or not. If new angularjs questions are coming in right now, they will continue to do so in the near future – Roc Aràjol yesterday
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@Braiam "every problem you can find with an old enough framework" The last stable, major version release of Angular 1 was released just this month. I don't think that's old enough to have found all of it's quirks. – Mike C yesterday
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@Braiam I don't think you need numbers to know that the quirks in a major version release will not have been figured out in less than a month. As for the angular-1.x issue, that may be due to people not knowing which tag to use. As others have said, it's likely that people are not tagging their Angular questions correctly. Hell, people are still asking questions about .NET 3.5 and it was released almost 10 years ago. – Mike C yesterday
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@Braiam Speaking as a member of that community, I don't think that it would, since AngularJS and Angular are two very different frameworks, despite the names. People fluent in AngularJS are not going to be able to answer Angular questions. They are that different. Certainly you wouldn't suggest that C and C++ should be combined since they share the "C" part of their name? – Mike McCaughan yesterday
up vote 0 down vote

There should be a consistent approach to this across the SO site. Angular is not the first framework to undergo a transformation. To remain consistent with the rest of the site I think you should be adding further tags to indicate the version of Angular which the question relates. The current Angular tag should apply to all Angular questions. This approach would seem to me to be consistent with that taken for (for example) Java, where there is a Java tag, and a Java-8 tag.

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up vote -16 down vote

UPDATE: Well, it would appear I seriously underestimated how different the two are. I'd spent a little time perusing some "what's different" pages, but now that I've heard all the comments below and done some further reading, yeah, I agree, they're pretty distinct. That said: There's still the complication that people are absolutely going to be using the term "Angular" to refer to both of these things for a while now.

=======

Sure, Angular 2 is a rewrite -- but it's still Angular. Meaning there will be lots of questions with answers that may not directly apply to both versions in the same way, but may apply to both with only syntactical modifications.

Think of iOS code... ObjC and Swift are significantly different languages, however the vast majority of the iOS API is available to code written in both languages, usually with identical behavior. So you wind up with tons of iOS answers on SO that apply to both, even though the syntax changes. Both Swift and ObjC questions tend to have the iOS tag. I often find an answer to a question written in Swift and apply that to my problem in ObjC.

So, maybe it makes sense to have an angular-legacy tag and an angular2 tag, but I think the angular tag should be attached to both versions.

EDIT: I may have underappreciated how different some of the basics are. That said, there are still many similarities as well, at least enough that some tag or other ought to, I think, refer to both versions.

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Angular 1.x and Angular (>= 2.x) have very different syntax and very different conventions. You cannot expect someone who only knows Angular 1.x to be capable of answering an Angular >= 2.x question. – Makoto 2 days ago
    
Yes, they are very different, but they are still a great deal more alike than, say, Angular 2.x and Express+Jade. The question, unless I'm misunderstanding here, is whether a tag should refer to both collectively, in addition to tags referring to each individually. I think NOT having a tag that encapsulates both would deprive users of answers that could be of value. Whether that tag is "angular" is another question I suppose, but for there to be NO tag that refers to both seems off to me. – DanM 2 days ago
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You're missing my point. Angular 1.x is similar to Angular 2.x in the same way that Java is similar to C++; they have some commonality in syntax and naming, but they've got different ways to go about things. – Makoto 2 days ago
    
@Makoto I'd say that a better comparison would be accessing the same SDK (or maybe consecutive versions of an SDK) through a java API and a C# API. – DanM 2 days ago
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As someone who's never used Angular 1.x but has spent roughly six months with Angular (2) from nothing to 1.0 release in my job, I cannot answer questions about the simplest of 1.x problems. The tags need to stay separate. – gelliott181 2 days ago
    
I can't find much common things between angular1 and angular2. No shared code. Not much shared concept. The language is also different. – Bryan Chen 2 days ago
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not to bead a dead horse, but I've built a large enterprise system with Angular 1.X and having seen Angular 2 the only similarity between the two is the name and the fact they are web frameworks. – Dan Pantry yesterday

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