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

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

#81

Post by AriaMinaei » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 11:52 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

> 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

Try "thinking and communicating clearly and precisely" the process of multiplying two numbers larger than one thousand, in Roman numerals.

For me, it was very difficult if I didn't cheat and implicitly convert everything in my head to normal (Hindu) numerals first.

Now, try to do the same thing with Babylonian numerals (base-60).

(I tried and gave up)

What I'm trying to illustrate is that the tool you use to express an idea, imposes a hard limit on how "clearly and precisely" you can think about that idea in the first place.

Hindu numerals are one tool (one notation) that make processes such as multiplication and division easy to express. If such tool wasn't invented, we'd be spending too much time 'thinking' and 'expressing' and 'teaching' multiplication, and be left with too little time to actually benefit from it.

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

#82

Post by lsdime » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 12:24 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

I couldn’t agree more — text just makes sense. All tools suck for some reasons but we all learn ways of dealing with them. Programming with text has issues but the power it provides is worth it and learning to deal with those issues only takes a few months.

I’d like to point out that 100k is not a lot in this market. Dev tools are an 11 figure market with tens of millions of programmers. I think the biggest change is the surface area has grown so much that the failed visual tools of yesteryear might have been able to carve out sustainable markets today. Bubble, Webflow, and Square Space can all be succeess stories but that doesn’t mean they’re a bellweather for all of coding. There are clearly a lot of small problems (simple web apps) business needs solved that are simple enough for these tools. I say hallelujah! Now I don’t have to update the pricing page every 3 days and can work on the real problems! The only caveat is to keep everyone in their swim lanes and don’t let the wise Bubble intern shard my database.

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

#83

Post by mozey » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 1:53 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #67

semperdark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Typing is not the hard part of programming.

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…

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

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

#84

Post by DonaldFisk » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

AriaMinaei wrote: post #81

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

> 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 Try "thinking and communicating clearly and precisely" the process of multiplying two numbers larger than one thousand, in Roman numerals. For me, it was very difficult if I didn't cheat and implicitly convert everything in my head to normal (Hindu) numera…

The Romans themselves didn't multiply Roman numerals. They used abacuses. Roman numerals were just the initial inputs and final output of calculations.

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

#85

Post by dustingetz » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

richardw wrote: post #37

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

Came here to say this. But then realised my wife. She did a year of com sci. She learned SQL at work. She can Excel with the best at her bank, with some VBA here and there. Still I had to coax her into learning Python for some bigger-than-Excel datasets. She wanted to for ages but just couldn't make the leap to "real" programming (her thinking, obviously not true). Even when she tried we had issues installing things.…

This is great, thanks. I think the issue is, things quickly turn bullshit.

Programming math is high school stuff, but imperative programming is bullshit. Memory leaks. Exceptions. Callback chaining. Asynchrony. Model-change listeners. Spooky action at a distance. Legacy interfaces.

Functional programming fixes all that.

Programming excel is college stuff. RDBMS is bullshit. JOIN pain, batching vs caching, ORM, pressure to denormalize for performance at scale, eventual consistency at scale. Non-RDBMS solutions generally make sacrifices regarding ACID vs consistency vs performance. Bullshit.

Immutability in the database fixes that too.

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

#86

Post by le-mark » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

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.

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

#87

Post by fsloth » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:23 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

A visual node based computation graph editor is nice when crafting 3D shaders, if the substrate is rich enough such that the number of nodes to visualize remains comprehensible.

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

#88

Post by fsloth » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

civility wrote: post #55

adrianN wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expec…

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.

This. The difference between python and excel is that excel functions at the same time as an IDE as well as data prototyping platform.

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

#89

Post by levonterteryan » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

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 (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

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

#90

Post by fsloth » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

waytogo wrote: post #57

swiley wrote: post #28

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 progra…

This and I would go one step further: visual programming tools are like GUIs and they are the main reason that people can't code nowadays. When I switched back to a shell after 20 years I realized how much a GUI hurts, how much I unlearned to work with computers. After decades of Windows and OSX, I got Arch with i3 (so no desktop environment). I am mainly using text-based software like the shell, bash, tmux and vim e…

"Visual tools don't teach you to code, they introduce an unnecessary layer"

I disagree. The main benefit of a visual tool (if implemented correctly) is that it exposes the constraints and the tool grammar to the user when implementing and not only when compiling.

The difference is more or less of that with clay, and lego blocks. Yes, you can design a house with both (Lego house). Clay offers an infinite shape grammar, but if all you want is a lego house, then Lego blocks are much faster.

Now, is the visual tool a cognitive crutch, or a bicycle for the mind, is another matter entirely.