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How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

315 points by ChanningAllen 9y ago

samspenc 9y ago
Am I right in understanding that Bubble is a GUI for building CRUD applications? If so, great work! It shows there is a need for these simple, automated tools for building simple CRUD applications, and that it is possible for these to be built and automated.
- collyw 9y ago
  We have had MS Access for years. It still requires a bit of knowledge about database design to use it properly. I don't know Bubble but I am skeptical about visual programming, as syntax is one of the easier parts to learn when coding, and isn't in my opinion what makes our profession difficult.
  - ivanhoe 9y ago
    IMHO visual programming should really aim more to be a scaffolding tool - so instead of replacing the syntax to focus more on speeding up the structuring of the code, helping you to easier manage and understand the blocks and the flow. Ideally it can then auto-generate the most of it and leave you to fine-tune the details of logic directly in the code (where it's faster and more expressive to be able to type the code directly).
    - carlmr 9y ago
      Also if it's not in text, you can't use all the tools effectively, like diffing, versioning, to actually create reliable tools with few bugs. I'm very skeptical of graphical programming.
      - spiralganglion 9y ago
        Unfortunately, there's a long history of graphical programming being foisted upon text-centric domains, which is just as bad as the reverse, so you're right to be skeptical. But if you shift perspective to another domain, graphical (or otherwise non-textual) programming becomes much more appealing. For example: Game devs build themselves sandbox environments in which they can test out their physics engine, dynamic music systems, animation playback, etc. These sandboxes are like REPLs, but for non-textual data. One can imagine how much nicer it would be if the full system's code were represented first-class inside that sandbox, so that you were introducing and manipulating system abstractions close to the truest representation of the data, rather than having to leave the sandbox to go back to your text editor to make system tweaks, far away from the data. Still skeptical about why that might be nice? Your text editor and terminal know nothing about the full, live representation of the data, so they do nothing to help you work in that domain. The nice things you get when working with text — diffs, versioning, etc — you don't get the physics engine / music engine / animation engine equivalents unless your code is somehow present in the same space as the live data.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - planteen 9y ago
    Totally agree. LabView control structures become unwieldy messes of spaghetti quickly from what I have seen. Visual programming is good for some niches in electrical engineering, for example, RF processing chains. But trying to use it for general purpose programming seems to lead to more complicity, not less.
acangiano 9y ago
For a similar idea, but more aimed at programmers, there is Anvil: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works
- tluyben2 9y ago
  I tried them both and (probably obviously as a programmer) find Anvil faster to work with. Some things are really fast in the visual environment, but when you are stuck, getting code out is really convenient. I do like both approaches.
pmontra 9y ago
I watched the demo video. It looks like what the Visual Basic form builder was for Windows programming in the 90s. However it will be difficult for non programmers. The very first dialog about Google Maps has menus "API provider" and "Query". I wonder how many non programmers know what they are. They can take a guess and learn but maybe this is still too low level. The second example is about building a login form by configuring its input fields. Maybe adding a completely configured dialog would be good enough for non programmers. Programmers can edit the details. Same for every other component. However I remember that non programmers didn't use Visual Basic, as easy as it was. Programmers did. Some non programmers built sites on MySpace some 10 years after VB, then wrote on various blog platforms and configured themes, then ended up on Facebook and other non programmable social media platforms. Outside the Web the most used non-programmers programming tool is still probably Excel. I've seen amazing stuff build there from people who couldn't write a two lines script in Python.
- clay_the_ripper 9y ago
  I agree. Bubble is way too advanced for non-programmers to just “pick up”. I am not a programmer but worked as a product manager for several years and consider myself technically knowledgeable (can copy and paste basic code, I know how an API works, I can write basic scripts, basic html, I understand conceptually things like oauth etc) and I found bubble to be basically incomprehensible. I could probably learn it if I was willing to dedicate some serious hours to it, but for the business I am in (founder of a marketing agency) it’s much cheaper for my to just hire a programmer than to dedicate several weeks/months to learning bubble. I hear it’s great for programmers to speed up their workflow though.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  I've seen people that used Excel every day for decades and didn't know there was something like the '=' that displayed the contents of one cell on another. They used it just for the tabular form. But I agree with you on everything.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  I agree. But while not "F U money" $100k p/m is enough to say: Well someone must be using it then. Perhaps, in the Hooked sense, the somewhat diffcult learning curve helps to increase long term retention?
Lapsa 9y ago
yet another LightSwitch. with better marketing
kristianc 9y ago
As a marketer, I've found Bubble to be really useful for building out small micro-apps for data-capture for clients who for whatever reason weren't ready to move to a solution like HubSpot. I'm not sure how I'd feel about using it for anything larger than that, though I've seen some worked examples of Twitter clones etc. There's probably slightly too much Bubble-specific terminology and concepts to make it worth learning if you are not going to become a Bubble consultant. Also, kind of expensive (monthly subscription) if you want to run a large production app on it. I love the range of API s and connectors though.
- wolco 9y ago
  It sounds like the "remedy" for app dev.
dkersten 9y ago
I just wanted to check out the website (not actually try it), but the Bubble page shows a blank page saying it doesn’t support my browser (safari on iOS). What a pity that it won’t even show me a landing page or whatever.
shostack 9y ago
Has anyone had experience transitioning a Bubble app into an actual coded app/DB outside of Bubble? I could see it as an interesting solution for rapid prototyping of ideas, but I'd be concerned about lock-in and extra expense later when migrating to something more robust.
- freqn 9y ago
  ^ This. I'm writing Bubble off as another hype-ster toy until proven wrong.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Based off the demos, it seems like you can integrate HTML directly, so it might be possible to move from Bubble to "external API + Bubble frontend" in a straightforward fashion. You could also likely put a layer in front of Bubble to only serve some pages with Bubble, other with your replacement. Also from the FAQ: > The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble. So you could probably add shims and move around. I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets
  - bluedino 9y ago
    >> The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble Programming without code...until you need to actually do something
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets This is basically what I do now at work. I was hired to, in part, work with several RAD-tool projects. I pretty quickly ended-up tho working on mostly backend code that the RAD tool projects interact with via, e.g. web requests. That's been a pretty good division of labor given that most of the RAD tool project's features are fairly simply in terms of UX. They're definitely not good enough to be widely used by lots of users tho, e.g. there's no real error handling.
eljimmy 9y ago
I had to learn and use Bubble to build an application (no choice, per client's request) and as a programmer I found it to be a nightmare. I can definitely see it as a great and useful tool for non-programmers, but having to go throw your entire skill-set and decades of knowledge out the window to use a tool like this was just a horrible experience. Again, I don't mean to disparage it, as I can see the benefits, but for programmers, you're better off building an app with the skills and knowledge you already possess.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  There's something like an 'uncanny valley' between RAD tools and a more 'best practices' setup/workflow. The upsides are obvious – someone that's not a 'software engineer' can program things that do real work! The downsides tho are much less obvious; more 'hidden' costs really. It's easy and quick to bang out a new feature, but also really easy to inadvertently update or rollback another unrelated set of changes. As a professional programmer, I sure don't want to give up version control, unit tests, integration tests, automated builds, and automated deployments. Tho in fairness to RAD tools, and both the code they produce and the whole workflow involved in using them, when I started my current position the non-RAD-tool code was (much) worse, and much more difficult to refactor and cleanup, than the RAD-tool code.
swiley 9y ago
I've seen plenty of visual programming tools and lots of other things to help "non programmers." I've even helped build one. The fact is that if you can think and communicate precisely enough to describe your ideas then you can enter them into a computer fairly easily in a language like python or basic. If you can't then no matter how fancy your tools are you still need something intelligent (currently a human programmer) to pull the idea out of you and encode it. Stuff like this isn't useful to people who are incapable of programming and is just a highly coupled mess that can't be easily automated and version controlled.
- semperdark 9y ago
  I agree. Typing is not the hard part of programming.
  - mitchtbaum 9y ago
    Still, a cross-platform GUI / VPE (visual programming environment) like this or https://glade.gnome.org/ https://glade.gnome.org/ might help for UIs.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    Typing wasn't the hard part of using shells, either, and yet GUIs have displaced them for many classes of users. One of the very hard parts is "knowing what things you can type." GUIs solved that problem for UI much better than shells did -- it was much easier to discover what the computer could do in an early GUI. A good visual programming language (not that I've seen one yet) could bring similar discoverability to programming.
    - mozey 9y ago
      I don't know, most times it is much quicker to do `--help | grep something` or similar than clicking through nested menus with limited or no search
- WalterSear 9y ago
  I can think of field where these kind of tools flourish: music and art. I'm thinking of this specific counter-example: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synths/reaktor-6/ https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt... There may be other specific problem domains where subject matter experts may be able to be productive, if given relatively basic programming tools along with specific, modular, abstractions useful to their problem domain. I could see drone programming becoming something like this - a farmer may need to update his drone behaviour every day, but he may not be excited about learning to 'program' it.
BLanen 9y ago
I'm very pessimistic of these types of products. Mostly because there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years. In the end any non-trivial business logic is too cumbersome to make in a GUI and is build much faster in text form ( programming language) or just can't be made with your platform. At that point it requires specialization and your need for a programmer is born.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > I'm very pessimistic of these types of products. > there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years You should be "pessimistic" – if the implied claim is that "these types of products" will replace all of the other standard programming paraphernalia! But, as you wrote, this stuff has been around for decades. And that's because there are lots of people that can do real work with these tools, but aren't otherwise willing to pay the (pretty) steep costs to get up to speed using the 'pro' programming tools.
andr3w321 9y ago
What I'd really like is a smarter compiler. My normal dev process is 1. Write code 2. Run code 3. See error 4. Google error 5. Write code to fix error 6. Repeat I'd like a compiler that helps speed up steps 3-5. I know IDEs do some of this, but I'd like a compiler that automatically fixes errors instead of just telling me what went wrong. One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in variable names or function calls. One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice. One that knows when I wrote an inefficient bubble sort and swaps it out with a faster sorting algorithm etc. One that can make my code run faster. I think this is a long way off, and I know it's really hard to write a program that writes code, but it's always seemed that programming simple things is way harder and takes longer than it should to me.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  You can use Javascript, the main engines will do that kind of magical "fixing" like adding missing semicolons and hoist variable definitions upwards in functions. It's even transparent. It's an hot mess. What you request in the last paragraph is a Junior Developer to do the grunt work of implementing a spec.
  - le-mark 9y ago
    I'm not sure why this has been down voted, but what you are describing as "magical" were a direct consequence of the "lazy" or "lackluster" language implementation. Semicolons are optional, and variable scope is not strictly lexical. This can be seen easily by implementing a javascript subset, which is an interesting excercise. Specifically, the part where you build symbol tables and do symbol resolution. These are also some of the reasons why Javascript is derided by many.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in variable names or function calls. Webstorm can do some of what you mention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15638652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15638652 One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice. Unfortunately this is "sufficiently smart compiler" territory. I'd love to be wrong about that though.
Impossible 9y ago
"Then, in October 2105, we launched publicly on ProductHunt" I'm guessing this should be October 2015, but it'd be awesome if Bubble was a product from the future sent back in time.
Postscapes 9y ago
I found this product awhile back and was so excited at first. I have a design background ( but can dabble in css, hack at php and python) but had trouble trying to get some APIs connected and displayed with Bubble. Please oh please, can one of you developers have Airtable and Webflow make a baby? This combo would be amazing for functional business use and data display and I would pay good money for it.
- spiralganglion 9y ago
  I agree — as someone with as much of a design background as a programming background, seeing something like Bubble described as "visual programming" feels a bit offensive. Yes, there's a bit of meaningful visual structure sprinkled here and there throughout their environment. But it's nothing like what one would imagine if they were left to freely ideate about some hypothetical, ideal "visual programming" environment. In a post-Bret Victor world, we know what such an environment might look like. Stop Drawing Dead Fish: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: https://vimeo.com/66085662 https://vimeo.com/66085662 As a visually-minded developer constantly hunting for such tools, and even working on some myself (in a small way — nothing that anyone here will ever end up using, surely), I can assure you that there's enough smoke that eventually we'll see something like what we desire catch fire. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see it come out of the world of video games, not web applications. So don't fret that Bubble looks like a step in the wrong direction. They're not building tools for visual thinkers, they're building tools for MBAs.
le-mark 9y ago
Wow this has been a disappointing discussion up to now, with most commenting on how much visual coding tools suck. That's not the take away here, at all. A frequently asked question is "where is Access for the Web?", closing aligned with "what happened to 4GL languages and tools" or "where are the RAD (rapid application development) app builders for the web?". This is an answer; they've hit $100k monthly. They have found a market where many, many similar projects (I've listed them here before) have not. The relevant and amazing thing is how? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? The interview gives some answers: He (Josh) was in New York, and everyone, literally everyone, was asking him to be their tech co-founder to start a business. We started "recruiting" users at tech meetups in New York. With the startup wave, everybody was looking for a tech co-founder, and there were plenty of co-founder-dating meetups. ... We went there and told people that while we couldn't be their tech co-founders, they could use Bubble, as it would allow them build the whole thing themselves. The following year (2013) we did a pilot at Harvard Business School, which I had just graduated from. Their first year entrepreneurship class required students to build something under a very tight budget, and Bubble was a good solution for this. Answer; these guys had a kick ass network and expanded it. They had direct access to people in their market who were starving for this type of app.
- JVIDEL 9y ago
  TBH (and it is an impressive app) there isn't much competition, not much going on despite coding-as-a-job being hammered in every article even remotely related to education and not just an extra skill but a vital one. And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    The question then is, what happens when they drink the lemonade? Thirst quenching? Butterflies and rainbows? Diarrhea? Cirrhosis? When you start building a normally-complicated application that isn't going to be thrown away at the end of the semester, well, then what?
levonterteryan 9y ago
Bubble platform is the most advanced no-code tool that exists so far. It allowed many entrepreneurs (including me) create apps fast and with low budget which otherwise would take many months and tens of thousands dollars to build. It's true, I'm a bit biased here, because it also became possible for me to start a no-code development business which never existed before. So we focus on building apps without code for people who don't have time or patience to learn the no-code tools or who don't have budgets to afford the traditional development. And for the sceptics that doubt about the complexity of apps that can be built without code you could check our portfolio at https://bubblewits.com https://bubblewits.com (this web-site is too built on Bubble). But we have taken it 1 step further and created a no-code platform for all things no-code. The main part of the paltform are the no-code templates built for Bubble. Which makes building new products and startups even faster (just like creating a web-site with Wordpress themes is easier than doing it from scractch). If you are curious take a look here: https://zeroqode.com https://zeroqode.com
- JVIDEL 9y ago
  So you guys are a service that build apps on bubble (for people that I guess can't even deal with a GUI) and also sell templates?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
stuartaxelowen 9y ago
"Josh and I both had enough savings from previous jobs to be able to live in NYC for more than two years (with a simple lifestyle…), and we didn't start paying ourselves a salary until 2.5 years in." Critical factor here.
akashpaul 9y ago
Keep it up!

315 points by ChanningAllen 9y ago

Am I right in understanding that Bubble is a GUI for building CRUD applications? If so, great work! It shows there is a need for these simple, automated tools for building simple CRUD applications, and that it is possible for these to be built and automated.

collyw 9y ago
We have had MS Access for years. It still requires a bit of knowledge about database design to use it properly. I don't know Bubble but I am skeptical about visual programming, as syntax is one of the easier parts to learn when coding, and isn't in my opinion what makes our profession difficult.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  IMHO visual programming should really aim more to be a scaffolding tool - so instead of replacing the syntax to focus more on speeding up the structuring of the code, helping you to easier manage and understand the blocks and the flow. Ideally it can then auto-generate the most of it and leave you to fine-tune the details of logic directly in the code (where it's faster and more expressive to be able to type the code directly).
  - carlmr 9y ago
    Also if it's not in text, you can't use all the tools effectively, like diffing, versioning, to actually create reliable tools with few bugs. I'm very skeptical of graphical programming.
    - spiralganglion 9y ago
      Unfortunately, there's a long history of graphical programming being foisted upon text-centric domains, which is just as bad as the reverse, so you're right to be skeptical. But if you shift perspective to another domain, graphical (or otherwise non-textual) programming becomes much more appealing. For example: Game devs build themselves sandbox environments in which they can test out their physics engine, dynamic music systems, animation playback, etc. These sandboxes are like REPLs, but for non-textual data. One can imagine how much nicer it would be if the full system's code were represented first-class inside that sandbox, so that you were introducing and manipulating system abstractions close to the truest representation of the data, rather than having to leave the sandbox to go back to your text editor to make system tweaks, far away from the data. Still skeptical about why that might be nice? Your text editor and terminal know nothing about the full, live representation of the data, so they do nothing to help you work in that domain. The nice things you get when working with text — diffs, versioning, etc — you don't get the physics engine / music engine / animation engine equivalents unless your code is somehow present in the same space as the live data.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- planteen 9y ago
  Totally agree. LabView control structures become unwieldy messes of spaghetti quickly from what I have seen. Visual programming is good for some niches in electrical engineering, for example, RF processing chains. But trying to use it for general purpose programming seems to lead to more complicity, not less.

acangiano 9y ago

For a similar idea, but more aimed at programmers, there is Anvil: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works

tluyben2 9y ago
I tried them both and (probably obviously as a programmer) find Anvil faster to work with. Some things are really fast in the visual environment, but when you are stuck, getting code out is really convenient. I do like both approaches.

pmontra 9y ago

I watched the demo video. It looks like what the Visual Basic form builder was for Windows programming in the 90s. However it will be difficult for non programmers. The very first dialog about Google Maps has menus "API provider" and "Query". I wonder how many non programmers know what they are. They can take a guess and learn but maybe this is still too low level. The second example is about building a login form by configuring its input fields. Maybe adding a completely configured dialog would be good enough for non programmers. Programmers can edit the details. Same for every other component. However I remember that non programmers didn't use Visual Basic, as easy as it was. Programmers did. Some non programmers built sites on MySpace some 10 years after VB, then wrote on various blog platforms and configured themes, then ended up on Facebook and other non programmable social media platforms. Outside the Web the most used non-programmers programming tool is still probably Excel. I've seen amazing stuff build there from people who couldn't write a two lines script in Python.

clay_the_ripper 9y ago
I agree. Bubble is way too advanced for non-programmers to just “pick up”. I am not a programmer but worked as a product manager for several years and consider myself technically knowledgeable (can copy and paste basic code, I know how an API works, I can write basic scripts, basic html, I understand conceptually things like oauth etc) and I found bubble to be basically incomprehensible. I could probably learn it if I was willing to dedicate some serious hours to it, but for the business I am in (founder of a marketing agency) it’s much cheaper for my to just hire a programmer than to dedicate several weeks/months to learning bubble. I hear it’s great for programmers to speed up their workflow though.
fiatjaf 9y ago
I've seen people that used Excel every day for decades and didn't know there was something like the '=' that displayed the contents of one cell on another. They used it just for the tabular form. But I agree with you on everything.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
I agree. But while not "F U money" $100k p/m is enough to say: Well someone must be using it then. Perhaps, in the Hooked sense, the somewhat diffcult learning curve helps to increase long term retention?

Lapsa 9y ago

yet another LightSwitch. with better marketing

kristianc 9y ago

As a marketer, I've found Bubble to be really useful for building out small micro-apps for data-capture for clients who for whatever reason weren't ready to move to a solution like HubSpot. I'm not sure how I'd feel about using it for anything larger than that, though I've seen some worked examples of Twitter clones etc. There's probably slightly too much Bubble-specific terminology and concepts to make it worth learning if you are not going to become a Bubble consultant. Also, kind of expensive (monthly subscription) if you want to run a large production app on it. I love the range of API s and connectors though.

wolco 9y ago
It sounds like the "remedy" for app dev.

dkersten 9y ago

I just wanted to check out the website (not actually try it), but the Bubble page shows a blank page saying it doesn’t support my browser (safari on iOS). What a pity that it won’t even show me a landing page or whatever.

shostack 9y ago

Has anyone had experience transitioning a Bubble app into an actual coded app/DB outside of Bubble? I could see it as an interesting solution for rapid prototyping of ideas, but I'd be concerned about lock-in and extra expense later when migrating to something more robust.

freqn 9y ago
^ This. I'm writing Bubble off as another hype-ster toy until proven wrong.
rtpg 9y ago
Based off the demos, it seems like you can integrate HTML directly, so it might be possible to move from Bubble to "external API + Bubble frontend" in a straightforward fashion. You could also likely put a layer in front of Bubble to only serve some pages with Bubble, other with your replacement. Also from the FAQ: > The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble. So you could probably add shims and move around. I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets
- bluedino 9y ago
  >> The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble Programming without code...until you need to actually do something
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets This is basically what I do now at work. I was hired to, in part, work with several RAD-tool projects. I pretty quickly ended-up tho working on mostly backend code that the RAD tool projects interact with via, e.g. web requests. That's been a pretty good division of labor given that most of the RAD tool project's features are fairly simply in terms of UX. They're definitely not good enough to be widely used by lots of users tho, e.g. there's no real error handling.

eljimmy 9y ago

I had to learn and use Bubble to build an application (no choice, per client's request) and as a programmer I found it to be a nightmare. I can definitely see it as a great and useful tool for non-programmers, but having to go throw your entire skill-set and decades of knowledge out the window to use a tool like this was just a horrible experience. Again, I don't mean to disparage it, as I can see the benefits, but for programmers, you're better off building an app with the skills and knowledge you already possess.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
There's something like an 'uncanny valley' between RAD tools and a more 'best practices' setup/workflow. The upsides are obvious – someone that's not a 'software engineer' can program things that do real work! The downsides tho are much less obvious; more 'hidden' costs really. It's easy and quick to bang out a new feature, but also really easy to inadvertently update or rollback another unrelated set of changes. As a professional programmer, I sure don't want to give up version control, unit tests, integration tests, automated builds, and automated deployments. Tho in fairness to RAD tools, and both the code they produce and the whole workflow involved in using them, when I started my current position the non-RAD-tool code was (much) worse, and much more difficult to refactor and cleanup, than the RAD-tool code.

swiley 9y ago

I've seen plenty of visual programming tools and lots of other things to help "non programmers." I've even helped build one. The fact is that if you can think and communicate precisely enough to describe your ideas then you can enter them into a computer fairly easily in a language like python or basic. If you can't then no matter how fancy your tools are you still need something intelligent (currently a human programmer) to pull the idea out of you and encode it. Stuff like this isn't useful to people who are incapable of programming and is just a highly coupled mess that can't be easily automated and version controlled.

semperdark 9y ago
I agree. Typing is not the hard part of programming.
- mitchtbaum 9y ago
  Still, a cross-platform GUI / VPE (visual programming environment) like this or https://glade.gnome.org/ https://glade.gnome.org/ might help for UIs.
- cwyers 9y ago
  Typing wasn't the hard part of using shells, either, and yet GUIs have displaced them for many classes of users. One of the very hard parts is "knowing what things you can type." GUIs solved that problem for UI much better than shells did -- it was much easier to discover what the computer could do in an early GUI. A good visual programming language (not that I've seen one yet) could bring similar discoverability to programming.
  - mozey 9y ago
    I don't know, most times it is much quicker to do `--help | grep something` or similar than clicking through nested menus with limited or no search
WalterSear 9y ago
I can think of field where these kind of tools flourish: music and art. I'm thinking of this specific counter-example: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synths/reaktor-6/ https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt... There may be other specific problem domains where subject matter experts may be able to be productive, if given relatively basic programming tools along with specific, modular, abstractions useful to their problem domain. I could see drone programming becoming something like this - a farmer may need to update his drone behaviour every day, but he may not be excited about learning to 'program' it.

BLanen 9y ago

I'm very pessimistic of these types of products. Mostly because there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years. In the end any non-trivial business logic is too cumbersome to make in a GUI and is build much faster in text form ( programming language) or just can't be made with your platform. At that point it requires specialization and your need for a programmer is born.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> I'm very pessimistic of these types of products. > there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years You should be "pessimistic" – if the implied claim is that "these types of products" will replace all of the other standard programming paraphernalia! But, as you wrote, this stuff has been around for decades. And that's because there are lots of people that can do real work with these tools, but aren't otherwise willing to pay the (pretty) steep costs to get up to speed using the 'pro' programming tools.

andr3w321 9y ago

What I'd really like is a smarter compiler. My normal dev process is 1. Write code 2. Run code 3. See error 4. Google error 5. Write code to fix error 6. Repeat I'd like a compiler that helps speed up steps 3-5. I know IDEs do some of this, but I'd like a compiler that automatically fixes errors instead of just telling me what went wrong. One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in variable names or function calls. One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice. One that knows when I wrote an inefficient bubble sort and swaps it out with a faster sorting algorithm etc. One that can make my code run faster. I think this is a long way off, and I know it's really hard to write a program that writes code, but it's always seemed that programming simple things is way harder and takes longer than it should to me.

JetSpiegel 9y ago
You can use Javascript, the main engines will do that kind of magical "fixing" like adding missing semicolons and hoist variable definitions upwards in functions. It's even transparent. It's an hot mess. What you request in the last paragraph is a Junior Developer to do the grunt work of implementing a spec.
- le-mark 9y ago
  I'm not sure why this has been down voted, but what you are describing as "magical" were a direct consequence of the "lazy" or "lackluster" language implementation. Semicolons are optional, and variable scope is not strictly lexical. This can be seen easily by implementing a javascript subset, which is an interesting excercise. Specifically, the part where you build symbol tables and do symbol resolution. These are also some of the reasons why Javascript is derided by many.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in variable names or function calls. Webstorm can do some of what you mention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15638652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15638652 One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice. Unfortunately this is "sufficiently smart compiler" territory. I'd love to be wrong about that though.

Impossible 9y ago

"Then, in October 2105, we launched publicly on ProductHunt" I'm guessing this should be October 2015, but it'd be awesome if Bubble was a product from the future sent back in time.

Postscapes 9y ago

I found this product awhile back and was so excited at first. I have a design background ( but can dabble in css, hack at php and python) but had trouble trying to get some APIs connected and displayed with Bubble. Please oh please, can one of you developers have Airtable and Webflow make a baby? This combo would be amazing for functional business use and data display and I would pay good money for it.

spiralganglion 9y ago
I agree — as someone with as much of a design background as a programming background, seeing something like Bubble described as "visual programming" feels a bit offensive. Yes, there's a bit of meaningful visual structure sprinkled here and there throughout their environment. But it's nothing like what one would imagine if they were left to freely ideate about some hypothetical, ideal "visual programming" environment. In a post-Bret Victor world, we know what such an environment might look like. Stop Drawing Dead Fish: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: https://vimeo.com/66085662 https://vimeo.com/66085662 As a visually-minded developer constantly hunting for such tools, and even working on some myself (in a small way — nothing that anyone here will ever end up using, surely), I can assure you that there's enough smoke that eventually we'll see something like what we desire catch fire. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see it come out of the world of video games, not web applications. So don't fret that Bubble looks like a step in the wrong direction. They're not building tools for visual thinkers, they're building tools for MBAs.

le-mark 9y ago

Wow this has been a disappointing discussion up to now, with most commenting on how much visual coding tools suck. That's not the take away here, at all. A frequently asked question is "where is Access for the Web?", closing aligned with "what happened to 4GL languages and tools" or "where are the RAD (rapid application development) app builders for the web?". This is an answer; they've hit $100k monthly. They have found a market where many, many similar projects (I've listed them here before) have not. The relevant and amazing thing is how? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? The interview gives some answers: He (Josh) was in New York, and everyone, literally everyone, was asking him to be their tech co-founder to start a business. We started "recruiting" users at tech meetups in New York. With the startup wave, everybody was looking for a tech co-founder, and there were plenty of co-founder-dating meetups. ... We went there and told people that while we couldn't be their tech co-founders, they could use Bubble, as it would allow them build the whole thing themselves. The following year (2013) we did a pilot at Harvard Business School, which I had just graduated from. Their first year entrepreneurship class required students to build something under a very tight budget, and Bubble was a good solution for this. Answer; these guys had a kick ass network and expanded it. They had direct access to people in their market who were starving for this type of app.

JVIDEL 9y ago
TBH (and it is an impressive app) there isn't much competition, not much going on despite coding-as-a-job being hammered in every article even remotely related to education and not just an extra skill but a vital one. And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.
- mcguire 9y ago
  The question then is, what happens when they drink the lemonade? Thirst quenching? Butterflies and rainbows? Diarrhea? Cirrhosis? When you start building a normally-complicated application that isn't going to be thrown away at the end of the semester, well, then what?

levonterteryan 9y ago

Bubble platform is the most advanced no-code tool that exists so far. It allowed many entrepreneurs (including me) create apps fast and with low budget which otherwise would take many months and tens of thousands dollars to build. It's true, I'm a bit biased here, because it also became possible for me to start a no-code development business which never existed before. So we focus on building apps without code for people who don't have time or patience to learn the no-code tools or who don't have budgets to afford the traditional development. And for the sceptics that doubt about the complexity of apps that can be built without code you could check our portfolio at https://bubblewits.com https://bubblewits.com (this web-site is too built on Bubble). But we have taken it 1 step further and created a no-code platform for all things no-code. The main part of the paltform are the no-code templates built for Bubble. Which makes building new products and startups even faster (just like creating a web-site with Wordpress themes is easier than doing it from scractch). If you are curious take a look here: https://zeroqode.com https://zeroqode.com

JVIDEL 9y ago
So you guys are a service that build apps on bubble (for people that I guess can't even deal with a GUI) and also sell templates?
- deleted 9y ago
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stuartaxelowen 9y ago

"Josh and I both had enough savings from previous jobs to be able to live in NYC for more than two years (with a simple lifestyle…), and we didn't start paying ourselves a salary until 2.5 years in." Critical factor here.

akashpaul 9y ago

Keep it up!