41–50 of 124 posts
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…
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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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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?
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…
Its a VB/Delphi style app builder for the web. It's got a visual UI builder, with Python code behind it (client and server, with RPC between them).
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That's actually very close to how modern game engines with with large teams(substitute designers/artists for product/business) work. Very cool stuff, kudos.
Yes gaming is more advanced that general purposes applications for some reasons. Let's change that :)
It's also really hard to build the right tools. It's very easy to sink 3-6mo into a tool that doesn't get a ton of usage because you either don't have partners on the other side who are invested or didn't solve the right problems.
For it to work right you need a lot of factors to go just right. When it does it's pretty incredible but feels a bit like trying to catch lightning in bottle.
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…
This is something that a lot of game and graphics programmers are doing already. UE4 uses Blueprints[0] now, with the ability for programmers to drop into C++ for more control.
I also think that having multiple ways to interact with programming languages is awesome from an accessibility perspective too.
[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/
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 ou…
I don't understand how/why people do this? the languages are so different I can't imagine doing it - libraries, control structures, types! what exactly are you prototyping then? just the shape of the code?
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…
You might want to check out https://anvil.works Its a VB/Delphi style app builder for the web. It's got a visual UI builder, with Python code behind it (client and server, with RPC between them).
No code required!.. unless you want need something that isn't a date picker or Google maps widget, then yeah you need to write code [0]. [0] https://manual.bubble.is/building-plugins/building-actions.h...
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.