No-code startup Bubble raises $100M • Hacker News Board

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#321

Post by nexuist » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

ozim wrote: post #159

dmix wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding the OP was addressing using English to code and how that might look at the fundamental level. Not critiquing or misunderstanding what software developers do day-to-day. It’s instead about different layers of abstraction. Which is the world we work in as programmers and one normal languages meant for communicating to other people is ill suited for and would be way more overly detailed.

So what OP is doing he is disregarding how complex the world is. He is disregarding how much effort and how many moving pieces are needed to have an employee with which you can order a sandwich and have it done the same way each time. For starters you have to have ingredients ready, standard ways of storing them and much more. That is what Subway worked on for years to have standards and be able to hire someone to "m…

I think our fundamental disconnect is that you see a world in which all software is unique, special, and does completely different things. I see a world where every website I use has the same stupid follow button that does the same stupid thing, where every navbar comes with a logout button, where every social media app is trying to look like the demon spawn of Clubhouse and Snapchat.

I see a world where every single mobile app wraps a UITableView with a few changed properties.

You're trying to tell me that there are thousands of engineers out there designing cars with alternatives to gas pedals and steering wheels, and yet every car off the line still has the same gas pedal and the same steering wheel from 20 years ago. It just isn't reality. Almost all of this stuff is cloning existing stuff and tacking on some new feature. "But steering wheels today have so many more buttons!" Okay. Take a steering wheel, add some buttons to it. Is it really that alien from a steering wheel without buttons?

And yeah! That new feature, that nobody has ever done before? You'll need to describe it to hell and back. Because of course the computer won't know what you're talking about. But the point is to get you 80% or 90% of the way there using common language, from there you can hire developers to finish the feature themselves or you can write a design spec for the computer to build. And now that the computer knows the feature? Well, you can create derivative works off that stored knowledge, and you won't have to spend your time writing the boilerplate and scaffolding needed to support that feature.

I don't think I'm disregarding how complex the world is, I think you're disregarding how utterly predictable software is.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#322

Post by Scea91 » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

thesz wrote: post #210

ramraj07 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

To write code is much like to instructing a person who is doing work-to-rule. That person won't do anything outside of instructions given and will stop at the very first time it can (encounter an error). If you can cope with instructing work-to-rule workers, you can code. No extraordinary smarts required. As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above avera…

> As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above average" as +15 points (IQ's standard deviation) and "much smarter" as another +30 points, we end at 160 IQ points person. Four standard deviations make that person one in roughly 16 000, or sixteen thousands. I think you should know a lot of people, much more than 150 or so of average person, to know many of them.

Nice example that if you define the terms to suit your argument then you can make any argument. Also, the word 'smart' has much wider scope than just IQ. It is also possible that the people OP knows are not sampled randomly from general population (he might be in a chess club for example).

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#323

Post by pnt12 » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

ghuntley wrote: post #74

breck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Try it out https://Gitpod.io#https://GitHub.com/gitpod-io/website PS. If you aren't impressed by a JavaScript app then take Kubernetes for a spin! https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-k3s :-)

Sounds great, I will definitely try it!

One of the latest OSS projects I checked required gcloud and some online account to run make, it wad absurd...

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#324

Post by ozim » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

nexuist wrote: post #321

ozim wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what OP is doing he is disregarding how complex the world is. He is disregarding how much effort and how many moving pieces are needed to have an employee with which you can order a sandwich and have it done the same way each time. For starters you have to have ingredients ready, standard ways of storing them and much more. That is what Subway worked on for years to have standards and be able to hire someone to "m…

I think our fundamental disconnect is that you see a world in which all software is unique, special, and does completely different things. I see a world where every website I use has the same stupid follow button that does the same stupid thing, where every navbar comes with a logout button, where every social media app is trying to look like the demon spawn of Clubhouse and Snapchat. I see a world where every single…

Everything you describe from my perspective is already solved.

*Every social media app...* - I have worked on warehouse automation projects, worked on multiple "specialists help tools" where logout button or just putting a text box was negligible effort.

Building HN like site - for me solved problem - there is bunch of clones on GitHub you can "git pull" and have it running in minutes. With docker it is even faster.

There is Wordpress, Salesforce you name it, you don't need to have any code and no low code. Hosting providers let you setup whole blog/e-commerce site with a single click.

In MailChimp I can create landing page with working email form without even knowing that HTML exists.

Using any of the frameworks like Rails or Django gives you that 80% or 90% that you describe, login/logout for free no coding. So if you just want to put some buttons and text boxes it is all solved already.

What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#325

Post by nexuist » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #324

nexuist wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think our fundamental disconnect is that you see a world in which all software is unique, special, and does completely different things. I see a world where every website I use has the same stupid follow button that does the same stupid thing, where every navbar comes with a logout button, where every social media app is trying to look like the demon spawn of Clubhouse and Snapchat. I see a world where every single…

Everything you describe from my perspective is already solved. * Every social media app...* - I have worked on warehouse automation projects, worked on multiple "specialists help tools" where logout button or just putting a text box was negligible effort. Building HN like site - for me solved problem - there is bunch of clones on GitHub you can "git pull" and have it running in minutes. With docker it is even faster.…

Using open source code and tools doesn't work if you don't know how to code. Paying someone else to do the work for you is no different from the current model and makes you dependent on their company leadership and business model. The best software development tool would be the one that replaces both of these.

> What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles.

But to get 90% of the way there is not as trivial as you are making it out to be. The smallest useful software projects take weeks, anything with some amount of complexity is at least a few months or years. Even with Rails nobody is pumping out a PoC in under 6 hours. The goal is to make it take hours what used to take years with hundreds of thousands of dollars in dev costs.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#326

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

Do these tools provide an "integration path"? For example, is there any of these tools written having in mind the fact that they will be replaced by a full fledged software if successful, and as such provide some "injection points" for manualky written software to be executed?

If yes, I can see that being reasonable as a solution to sliwly migrate from a no code software to a fully coded software.

I understand and appreciate the idea of prototyping without code, however this goes end in end with the reality that if adoption is big and you suddenly have to make something performant and it's impossible on the no code tool, you might have a big problem to do (write from scratch) with a tight timeline (performance exploding), potentially losing customers.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#327

Post by ozim » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

nexuist wrote: post #325

ozim wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you describe from my perspective is already solved. * Every social media app...* - I have worked on warehouse automation projects, worked on multiple "specialists help tools" where logout button or just putting a text box was negligible effort. Building HN like site - for me solved problem - there is bunch of clones on GitHub you can "git pull" and have it running in minutes. With docker it is even faster.…

Using open source code and tools doesn't work if you don't know how to code. Paying someone else to do the work for you is no different from the current model and makes you dependent on their company leadership and business model. The best software development tool would be the one that replaces both of these. > What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated…

This complexity does not come from "coding is hard" and developers writing "basic elements from scratch".

It all comes from requirements that business has and that world is complex.

I am just re-reading "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks. Everything that I am writing about is not simply my ideas, but something that is understood in the industry. That developers more and more don't address accidental complexity but essential complexity that is those 10% that you mention.

Even if that was written in 1987 - I totally agree with what is written there, because there is no General AI in sight that would do what you expect. All of it is even more so true with all the things I mentioned earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet