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Bubble – Visual Programming

bubble.is

31–40 of 124 posts

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#31

Professional programmers often scoff at these kinds of tools, a lot of time for good reason. However I believe that with the right approach such a system could also speed development for a lot of serious and complex development efforts. It would have to use standard pro level libraries and tools underneath, with the easy UI being essentially and abstraction over of subset of the functionality. This would allow it to…

Have you worked with Borland Delphi? Is it close to the ideal you described?

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#32

Professional programmers often scoff at these kinds of tools, a lot of time for good reason. However I believe that with the right approach such a system could also speed development for a lot of serious and complex development efforts. It would have to use standard pro level libraries and tools underneath, with the easy UI being essentially and abstraction over of subset of the functionality. This would allow it to…

If by "easy UI" you mean a WYSIWYG UI editor, those exist for most serious development of applications, such as for Windows, iOS, and Android, though they still aren't the norm in web for some reason.

But if by "easy UI" you mean the visual programming language, or the graphical DDL, then I'm skeptical it has any value to programmers. No programmer I know would want to use a visual programming language at all, even with an option to fall into a full text-based programming language.

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#34
You know, a lot of people criticize visual programming as not being powerful enough -- when you encounter some kind of edge case you then outgrow the tool. Instead the problem with these kind of systems are is that it requires structured, problem solving type thinking. Learning the syntax is the easiest part of programming.

I see people struggling with tools like Google Calendar, physical security alarm systems and parking a vehicle in a tight location. They don't apply basic problem solving, and without developing that skillset these kinds of tools will continue to be useless for that demographic.

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#35

You know, a lot of people criticize visual programming as not being powerful enough -- when you encounter some kind of edge case you then outgrow the tool. Instead the problem with these kind of systems are is that it requires structured, problem solving type thinking. Learning the syntax is the easiest part of programming. I see people struggling with tools like Google Calendar, physical security alarm systems and p…

In general, yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

Though for simple tasks, syntax is the biggest blocker, and visual programming is preferable. See the success of IFTTT as an example.

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#36
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how many paying users you have.

I won't be too specific, but in the thousands of apps, and enough to support a team of 6 people (we're entirely bootstrapped).

Is there a bias toward a specific industry or application type among your paying users?

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#37
I have seen a lot of tools like this but they seem to fall apart as soon as some (mild) complexity is reached. Labview is a good example. Really easy to click together something simple but as soon as you have loops, conditionals or threading it gets really complex. VB or Delphi worked because they only had the UI through a UI builder but then you had regular code underneath.

I think there would be room for something like Delphi or VB for web apps though.

It's kind of interesting that after all these years text is till the best representation for software.

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#38
LabView is the classic example of graphical programming used in professional practice. It works well, but has a large learning curve. My first paid programming job was an undergraduate summer research project. I was tasked with re-writing a LabView function, a simple coefficient of variation - mean divided by standard deviation, in C++. LabView can call C++ DLLs. The resulting function was 5x faster and meant that our imaging of blood flow could be done in real-time vs. recorded and post-processed.

FWIW, it took 10x as long to get the DLL call to work as it did to drag-and-drop the coefficient of variation box into the GUI. There are certainly rapid prototyping benefits to be had with higher-level languages. Nowadays I prototype in Python and rewrite line-by-line in C++ if I really need the speed. I think GUI programming languages might serve a similar purpose.

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the vision. But then other people can use the plugin without coding, so the work is only done once. Disclaimer: I'm the founder, but didn't initiate this thread. Happy to answer questions though.

Bubble is such a great tool, and you really put a lot of attention to the details. I really enjoyed trying it. My question is: So one big strength of textual languages vs visual tools(and DSL's) is expressivity - visual languages are limited to their specific domains, while you can use, say, python to build complete systems. Do you see this distinction remaining ? or we'll have some way to build multi-domain systems…

I think if we want explore ways to connect these worlds we should do same as we are trying to do our architecture: separate view and logic. Most programming languages are quite messy if you think those as abstract model and therefore compilers won't have very good API (if any) for building application from non-textual inputs.

On the other hand views should be much more data-oriented. For example user actions should be copy-pasteable, editable as data and therefore usable for automation. -Text? Easy "it has been since 60's". -Visual (button click, drag&drop etc.)? "IMPOSSIBLE!". I claim that it's just bad habit which started as "MVP"-syndrome, continued as "Typical user won't..."-syndrome and finally ended up to "This is what GUI is"-syndrome.

Yea I think I may cut some corners but I cannot see any fundamental barriers here. Therefore I am currently researching this area and hopefully get something out at some point (or die tryin’).

Re: Bubble – Visual Programming

#40

Professional programmers often scoff at these kinds of tools, a lot of time for good reason. However I believe that with the right approach such a system could also speed development for a lot of serious and complex development efforts. It would have to use standard pro level libraries and tools underneath, with the easy UI being essentially and abstraction over of subset of the functionality. This would allow it to…

If by "easy UI" you mean a WYSIWYG UI editor, those exist for most serious development of applications, such as for Windows, iOS, and Android, though they still aren't the norm in web for some reason. But if by "easy UI" you mean the visual programming language, or the graphical DDL, then I'm skeptical it has any value to programmers. No programmer I know would want to use a visual programming language at all, even w…

Seems like this would be a great way to teach kids, no?
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