The async pipe to do asynchronous binding is pretty sweet. I think (if I remember correctly) they tried to do something like this by default in Angular 1 (i.e. wait until promises resolve and then display the result), but then they took it out because it was causing other issues. If you did want all your bindings to by async in Angular 2, though, I wonder if there is a way to set a global configuration option or something. That way you don't need to include the | async with each binding.
There is a big, big difference between Angular and the other frameworks you mentioned. Angular is part of a larger ecosystem (i.e. JavaScript) that is going through massive changes on its own (i.e. ES6 and all the other new JavaScript goodness). Angular can stand pat and do nothing while the world around them changes, but that is probably not the best strategy either.
Hopefully we didn't come off as too harsh. We were more poking harmless fun than trying to criticize. The Googlers I know that use Dart love it and swear by it.
As for little/no benefits, that is certainly not true. Angular 2 is going to be better in almost every way from Angular 1 and there are many great apps built off Angular 1. If you haven't tried Angular 2, I suggest giving it a go once the they get to beta.
Do'ah. Valid criticism. We generated the pie charts from Google Forms (where we had the survey), but we didn't like they way they displayed the results (they were out of order). We should have added the color legend to our sorted results. I will add that later tonight after work. Apologies.
Shoot, yeah, you are right. I am one of the authors. I just updated this, but it looks like the page is cached so will take a couple minutes for it to correctly show 196.
I think it is hard to appreciate DDoS until you are the target. About 7 years ago, my business partner made fun of a hacker who was trying to blackmail us and before we knew it, we were under attack. I didn't even know what DDoS was at that time, but I certainly found out. We had an eCommerce site and it was down hard for three days until we found one of the very few companies providing any level of DDoS protection at that time. We finally got the site back up, but the damage was done. We ended up closing down that business a couple months later.
I have found people that are often the most satisfied at work are the ones that have figured out the best way to play a game with their own emotions and instincts. They understand when they are tired and what makes them tired. The know how to dangle the carrot in front of themselves to get to the next level. Sure, they may dislike work at some instinctual level just like everyone else, but they control that along with everything else in their lives.
There is no doubt Google continues to get better at indexing client side rendered HTML but it is not perfect and indexing is not the same as ranking high in organic search. For ranking, there are distinct advantages to server rendering. The biggest one is consistent initial page load performance. Long story short, if you care about ranking and not just indexing, you still need server rendering.
This is somewhat of a response to a lot of discussion recently about how Angular2 doesn't have two-way data binding. It's sort of funny because two-way data binding is a really nice feature for prototyping and getting people started, but it is horrible for building large, robust web apps. I think the Angular team made the right move here, but I hope that they are able to come up with other easy ways to get people started on Angular and enable quick prototyping.
This talk was awesome. Aaron Frost mentioned later that this talk got the first standing ovation in ng-conf history. Whether you love or hate Angular, you will be on the floor laughing your ass off.
This will not be the case at all with Angular2. Most of the "angular" stuff will be in annotations and your code is going to be vanilla ES6 for the most part (well, with TypeScript). So, you actually are going to have a lot more freedom to mix and max other technologies.
Also, FYI, the barrier in 1.x is not that high, either. There are many integrations between Angular and other frameworks (including React, FYI).