I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate.
I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a completely different framework. You don't expect going from Postgres 8 to Postgres 9 that the underlying query language is going to be switched out for a different one. Regularly communicating with your users, as Angular and Babel did, only reaches the engaged part of the community. A lot of workaday programmers are not that deeply engaged. You're just moving their cheese, and it makes them mad.
A better approach is to spin off a new system and give it a new name. This is what happened with Express and Koa, and it gives you a way to gauge whether people actually want the change you're making or not. I predict Angular 1 is going to be the Windows XP of front end development: lingering on for much longer than anyone expects. Slow and principled change is not a common thing in Javascript-land but it is what legions of software engineers expect. A lot of front-end development, like it or not, is being done by full-stack engineers or other engineers who are not front-end developers exclusively. Asking your echo chamber if they like your ideas is not really a sufficient sounding process, especially if you're making a deep cut.
I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a completely different framework. You don't expect going from Postgres 8 to Postgres 9 that the underlying query language is going to be switched out for a different one. Regularly communicating with your users, as Angular and Babel did, only reaches the engaged part of the community. A lot of workaday programmers are not that deeply engaged. You're just moving their cheese, and it makes them mad.
A better approach is to spin off a new system and give it a new name. This is what happened with Express and Koa, and it gives you a way to gauge whether people actually want the change you're making or not. I predict Angular 1 is going to be the Windows XP of front end development: lingering on for much longer than anyone expects. Slow and principled change is not a common thing in Javascript-land but it is what legions of software engineers expect. A lot of front-end development, like it or not, is being done by full-stack engineers or other engineers who are not front-end developers exclusively. Asking your echo chamber if they like your ideas is not really a sufficient sounding process, especially if you're making a deep cut.