5 ms·

People may be capable of programming, but are not programmers. They do some other full time job and can't invest 2000 hours per year for 5 years to become effi

People may be capable of programming, but are not programmers. They do some other full time job and can't invest 2000 hours per year for 5 years to become efficient at all the detailed things the programmers have to deal with. The use case is people who can excel at Excel, but don't want to learn about dependency injection, semantic versioning, exception handling etc.

adrianN 9y ago
If you can excel in Excel, you certainly can do similar jobs with Python. You don't need dependency injection, semantic versioning (any version control at all!) or exception handling to write a script that turns your data from format A to format B and generates a summary. Most people can probably learn enough Python to do that in two or three weeks. There is a large gap between what professional programmers are expected to know and the minimum skillset needed to write programs that are useful for one specific task. Many people in your typical office would benefit from the ability to (partially) automate some of the tasks they do every day. Implying that they have to invest countless hours to learn how to do that is part of the problem.
- civility 9y ago
  There are lots of people who do elaborate things in Excel. I'm sure they could learn Python, but they don't and won't. Instead of changing the people, consider that maybe what they want/need is something like Excel but more powerful.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    But Bubble doesn't seem like an Excel but more powerful.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    This. The difference between python and excel is that excel functions at the same time as an IDE as well as data prototyping platform.
  - collyw 9y ago
    iPython (or is it Jupyter now) notebooks sound better suited to the task.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I've known a lot of people to end up using Excel simply because it is the only "programmable" application that is available - if you can't install new applications (which is pretty common in many non-developer environments) then you are stuck with what you get installed for you, which in many cases is Excel.
- petra 9y ago
  Python is great, but if your goal is to build a simple web app, there's no simple, pythonic way to do that. Maybe anvil.works will be that one, but currently, there's a hole in the market, and bubble fits this hole very well.

adrianN 9y ago

If you can excel in Excel, you certainly can do similar jobs with Python. You don't need dependency injection, semantic versioning (any version control at all!) or exception handling to write a script that turns your data from format A to format B and generates a summary. Most people can probably learn enough Python to do that in two or three weeks. There is a large gap between what professional programmers are expected to know and the minimum skillset needed to write programs that are useful for one specific task. Many people in your typical office would benefit from the ability to (partially) automate some of the tasks they do every day. Implying that they have to invest countless hours to learn how to do that is part of the problem.

civility 9y ago
There are lots of people who do elaborate things in Excel. I'm sure they could learn Python, but they don't and won't. Instead of changing the people, consider that maybe what they want/need is something like Excel but more powerful.
- icebraining 9y ago
  But Bubble doesn't seem like an Excel but more powerful.
- fsloth 9y ago
  This. The difference between python and excel is that excel functions at the same time as an IDE as well as data prototyping platform.
- collyw 9y ago
  iPython (or is it Jupyter now) notebooks sound better suited to the task.
arethuza 9y ago
I've known a lot of people to end up using Excel simply because it is the only "programmable" application that is available - if you can't install new applications (which is pretty common in many non-developer environments) then you are stuck with what you get installed for you, which in many cases is Excel.
petra 9y ago
Python is great, but if your goal is to build a simple web app, there's no simple, pythonic way to do that. Maybe anvil.works will be that one, but currently, there's a hole in the market, and bubble fits this hole very well.