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

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

#111

Post by collyw »

dustingetz wrote: post #85
richardw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pressu…

Forgive my imagination, but an immutable database sounds pretty useless.

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

#112

Post by collyw »

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.

iPython (or is it Jupyter now) notebooks sound better suited to the task.

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

#113

Post by collyw »

bitwize wrote: post #68
murukesh_s wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding with text is easy, but then why we there is a gap between getting a prototype/design done and the actual implementation? Text based coding is certainly more efficient in representing logic in a concise way, but the current set of frameworks and tooling on text based environments requires an exhorbitant amount of learning to produce a working application(e.g React), that's where the rapid application developmen…

> Coding with text is easy, but then why we there is a gap between getting a prototype/design done and the actual implementation? The solution for this is simple, really: simply declare the prototype the working implementation, and put devs on the hook for maintaining it.

Don't see why you are being down voted. That always seems to end up happening.

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

#114

Post by collyw »

flukus wrote: post #63
waytogo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd go a step further again and say that GUI's are why people have no idea how to use computers anymore. A file is a concept the average user is becoming less familiar with, directories of files have almost disappeared entirely for them. The idea that you could manipulate an image in a paint program and have it updated in your word document is black magic, so tools like word and excel have to do everything they need.…

A file is just an abstraction at the end of the day. The hardware knows little more about a file than an ignorant iPhone user.

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

#115

Post by dustingetz »

collyw wrote: post #111
dustingetz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pressu…

Forgive my imagination, but an immutable database sounds pretty useless.

Useless like git? :) Immutable here just means append-only. If old history is fixed it is really easy to have pervasive caching, which helps make chatty queries faster (e.g. solve N+1 problem)

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

#116

Post by lcedp »

collyw wrote: post #111
dustingetz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pressu…

Forgive my imagination, but an immutable database sounds pretty useless.

Why? Just create a new db if you want to make a change :-)

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

#117

Post by collyw »

dustingetz wrote: post #115
collyw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my imagination, but an immutable database sounds pretty useless.

Useless like git? :) Immutable here just means append-only. If old history is fixed it is really easy to have pervasive caching, which helps make chatty queries faster (e.g. solve N+1 problem)

Well why not say append only?
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