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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

reuters.com

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Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#51

Post by nexuist »

zkldi wrote: post #43
nexuist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do, and some developer tool generates thousands of variants (maybe through a genetic algorithm?) until you reach a design and functionality you're comfortable shipping. At a certain point we should be able to declaratively describe entire businesses, and have the computer work with vendors and other people online to carry out bus…

> Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do, Isn't that just code? I'm convinced that for sufficiently complex "no-code" solutions, you just end up with a poor mans programming language.

No, because programming wraps around the instruction-based model that processors use to execute programs. When you elevator pitch a product, you don't give them a list of instructions the product carries out, you tell them what the product does in broad terms.

The theoretical next level of programming is being able to pitch your software to the computer, having it build it in real time, and playing around and tweaking it until it matches your vision in your head. This is not what programming is today because you have to spend far too much effort dealing with low level problems.

The theoretical next level of programming is essentially just a programming language for product managers, I think.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#52

Post by nexuist »

neatze wrote: post #32
nexuist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do, and some developer tool generates thousands of variants (maybe through a genetic algorithm?) until you reach a design and functionality you're comfortable shipping. At a certain point we should be able to declaratively describe entire businesses, and have the computer work with vendors and other people online to carry out bus…

> You type in English what you want the application to do. In my experience this is the hardest part of coding, to a large degree.

Because modern coding is still too low level to allow quick development of full blown applications. It would be really annoying if you had to tell a Subway employee behind the counter how to use their hands to pick up ingredients, how many ingredients to pick up, when to move the sandwich down the line, when to stop applying mayo etc. Instead we can just tell them to make a BLT sandwich and they'll do it with little to no intervention. This is the same ideal we should strive for in our compilers and interpreters. Maybe the request is too vague and the employee has to ask for clarification - and that's okay! That's still far faster than micromanaging their muscle movements. Modern coding is micromanaging muscle movements. We want to evolve to a point where we can just ask the computer to make us a cake and be able to eat it, too.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#53

Post by vosper »

newhouseb wrote: post #27
vosper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm right there with ya cries in not even Coffee version 2 . One day maybe it'll be a lucrative niche for contractor legacy-maintenance warriors. That'll happen before I convince senior management that startups with React and Typescript can run rings around us, and that I can't find anyone fulltime who wants to work on our stack (or has even worked in not-React)... If anyone wants to chime in with their stories about…

Dropbox has a fairly exhaustive post about moving away from Coffeescript that involves decaffeinate: https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-type... . I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. [Disclaimer: used to work at Dropbox, bu…

> I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale.

Looks like they founded in 2012, which is right on time for Coffeescript. So, there's a good chance it's not just Coffee - could well be Backbone, jQuery, Handlebars etc all mixed in there, too. You can definitely work React into a codebase like that (we have) but that could be a ton of work to get away from. Those codebases often ended up as un-unit-tested spaghetti.

Codebases from that era are a tech-debt albatross. Sure, you can make them work, but at some point something's going to come along built with modern tooling and just move so much faster.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#54

Post by yuvalhazaz »

deeviant wrote: post #10

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

We try to solve precisely that with Amplication, where we combine low-code with custom code. We generate a node.js and react application based on low-code configuration and push the code to your GitHub repo

https://github.com/amplication/amplication

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#55

Post by mrspeaker »

rattray wrote: post #44
deeviant wrote: post #10

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

I'd be curious to hear from someone who's built a truly complicated app with bubble (equivalent of >50k loc not just crud). I can't think of a reason it'd be impossible to build a no-code app that scales as well as code, and I don't have evidence that Bubble has failed.

I worked on a Bubble app that definitely hit the limits of how big apps should be. The work flow box things still give me nightmares. It's very hard to figure out the order things were executing, and we had to resort to A LOT of JavaScript blocks to break out of the normal workflow to get features working that weren't achievable with the built-in tools.

If felt like there was a missing level of abstraction - everything was too intertwined. Making changes to anything becomes harrowing once the app becomes large - it was slow, and you don't know which UI elements are being accessed by any blocks - so it's really easy to break things without realizing. And the undo system gives you no visual clue as to what is being undo-d if it was in a different view. It was the most fragile system I've worked on.

However, many of those issues could be fixed, improved, or redesigned. If you were doing "regular" use-case stuff it was... fun! Our designer could get in and implement/test things really easily.

My gut feeling is that there could be system that scales well - but the escape hatches need to be reliable when you hit the edges.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#56

Post by arthurcolle »

vosper wrote: post #53
newhouseb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox has a fairly exhaustive post about moving away from Coffeescript that involves decaffeinate: https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-type... . I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. [Disclaimer: used to work at Dropbox, bu…

> I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. Looks like they founded in 2012, which is right on time for Coffeescript. So, there's a good chance it's not just Coffee - could well be Backbone, jQuery, Handlebars etc all mixed in there, too. You can de…

Pretty ~easy~ legacy codebase migration gig if you're into that kinda work

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#57

Post by breck »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #50
brundolf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing th…

I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such. Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.

GitPod.io

I was waiting for something like this for years, it’s great.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#58

Post by brundolf »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #50
brundolf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing th…

I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such. Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.

What I'm talking about is a solution for people who don't even want to know what a "script" or a "VM" is. Allowing them to learn and write only what they would actually need to care about: code.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#59

Post by motoxpro »

deeviant wrote: post #10

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

I think the problem is that you don't need a "mature" product to make millions of dollars.

It's similar to Shopify, I can put up a store in ~20 mins and start selling immediately. I would be extremely misguided to try to "build an platform" when that problem has already been solved.

Same with no-code. Why code it from scratch when it's been solved already? If you want to go super deep, sure. Seems like the hate comes from a cross of not-invented-here syndrome crossed with only 10 billion dollar companies in 2 years are cool.

Here's an example of a Bubble biz. https://goodgigs.app/

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#60

Post by quickthrower2 »

darepublic wrote: post #45

If Bubble is not a bubble, a coder should be able to sit down and figure things out intuitively and start getting better results than they would busting out create-react-app, or their java spring framework backend. Wait, that's not that unbelievable!

It's all fun and games until you get a requirement that requires you to code. Now you have to code anyway, but using something that has 0.001% of the support online in terms of docos, solved problems, stackoverflow answers, and ongoing support from Oracle/MS/Facebook etc. of mainstream frameworks.

Bubble is great if you can't code and you want to save $5k on a developer (if the project is >$5k then its probably already too complex for no code!)

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