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

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#91

Post by cyberpunk » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #58

_carbyau_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not really sure how one could be w computer programmer without knowing anything about computers…

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#92

Post by zingar » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:50 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #61

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 hope with $100m they can solve this. I think the only way to solve this is to hard-code so many different use cases into the gallery of controls, workflows and repeaters etc. that anything you dream of is easy to build. They also need to invest heavily into UX and the ease of figuring out how to do something. I've used Bubble and similar tools, and they share something in common with coding - you need to watch/read…

Suspenders is what you describe for Rails. It bakes in lots of opinions, obviously, but the idea is that you can go to production with this code by pushing it to your heroku repo.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#93

Post by zamalek » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

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.

My issue with no-code/low-code is that it puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the developer before the user. When you look at the amount of time spent staring at a screen, your users spend way more time (person-hours) looking at your app than you do coding it. Why all this focus on what is arguably the least important actor in the system?

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#94

Post by lionkor » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #63

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.

It's frustrating. Especially now that I'm nearing 15 years as a professional coder, I already spend less and less time typing and more thinking and working on different views on the problem. Typing or reading text is not difficult!

This touches on the real issue here -- the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text. Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic, since there are millions of people wo do nothing else but read text-code all day, me included.

All you do with no-code programming is outsourcing writing the actual code to some other company, who already did all the work for you, and you just plug it together. To me, that doesn't reduce complexity, or mental load, it just offloads it to someone else. There's no "no-code" here, they just let you use the code they engineered.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#95

Post by RandomLensman » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:20 AM UTC

capybara_2020 wrote: post #35

Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers, and they have been trying for decades. But failed! They built an app that allowed you to drag and drop blocks, and they tried a visual query builder(not sure what the exact name was) for SQL. They added a workflow builder to ShareP…

The environment and situation has changed:

(i) higher coding literacy, either from folks already knowing something or companies taking a more active role in providing trading for some minimum set of coding skills.

(ii) more compliance burden and control, i.e. while in the old days people might have been allowed to use Excel macros, some development environment etc., today tools are more likely to be locked down. So a controlled environments allowing people to do limited development and adaptation are of interest.

(iii) Low hanging fruits partially picked. There are tasks that could be automated but where gathering the requirements is too expensive. For example, small tasks done by a few people only - but there are a lot of those. So allowing people to partially automate themselves is a good idea.(and yes, these tasked could well be pretty trivial).

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#96

Post by lionkor » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

I know I'm the old man screaming at the clouds here, but the biggest problem I see with this is that it leads to engineers being pushed to outcompete these systems in iteration speed, which is impossible.

An engineer might get the task to make some feature, and the manager goes and uses bubble to make it and sees it only takes an hour, the engineer sits there for 5 doing it, you can imagine the rest.

The engineer might take care to make the code maintainable, fast, and expandable for some other feature that is planned, but nobody up the chain of command cares about stuff like that.

It's the kind of thing that makes the developer's lives harder, the apps more bloated, all to get the features out faster to the users for a few years until it all breaks down and you have to rewrite it.

I'm not convinced. I read this entire thread, but I never see a real benefit for users or programmers, just managers who enjoy pumping up some metrics so they can advance their career.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#97

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

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.

Well, learning how to code is not the only issue. Tooling installation, deployment etc is, at least for me, even after having written code for almost 40 years, a huge annoyance. I want to think about problems and logic; I couldn't care less about what editor I use or any of that and I care even less how it's deployed. As long as it's up and fast, I don't care. And this is still not that simple still, after all these cloud advancements to do except for the most trivial cases (static-ish websites).

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#98

Post by elcomet » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:29 AM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #96

I know I'm the old man screaming at the clouds here, but the biggest problem I see with this is that it leads to engineers being pushed to outcompete these systems in iteration speed, which is impossible. An engineer might get the task to make some feature, and the manager goes and uses bubble to make it and sees it only takes an hour, the engineer sits there for 5 doing it, you can imagine the rest. The engineer mig…

I don't think that's gonna be a real problem after a short adaptation time. Managers will learn the limits of the tools. Of course, if a product made by bubble is sufficient to solve the problem, than the engineer did a bad job when making a custom solution.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#99

Post by taneq » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:30 AM UTC

_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.

Likewise, I've used several OSS projects that I'd be quite happy to fix bugs in or develop new features for, but every single time I've been put off by having to decipher some mostly undocumented or otherwise horrendous build process.

Ironically (or perhaps obviously) the OSS projects I've used that have approachable build processes and requirements don't seem to have easily-fixed problems...

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#100

Post by foxpurple » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:34 AM UTC

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.

What if you are just building a generic CRUD app?