> To get there, programming tools should first use our language. For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red.
We've had that for over twenty years.
We've had that for over twenty years.
My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.
Visual Studio and many others have this out of the box but there's plenty of companies that do well selling exactly this like telerik.
I personally don't and been doing it the "hard way" since the beginning because it feels less confining. And I don't want to rely on an IDE to build something. Plus the code it generates was always kind of kludgy.
Perhaps, in part, because one allows for a greater expressiveness -- albeit with a little more planning and cognitive load.
Visual editors don't work so well with pages where parts are static & parts are dynamically generated. (Like, a css class may be different based on the data that it's showing). And at this point, pretty much every page in a web app has dynamic parts.
Turn the color of button3 in pane4 red
pane4.button3.color = 'red'
#pane4 #button3 { color:red;}
I think python strikes a good balance, naturalish language whenever possible, without forcing it into places where it doesn't fit. At least that's the feel I got from it.
I just showed it to my girlfriend who is learning Python. Her comment was "hmm but is this really easier than learning to code"? Well, it probably IS a lot easier, as long as your app fits within the constraints of what Bubble can do.
The problem with such tools is always that you very quickly hit the limits of what they can do, and then you're stuck. You can't easily peel back the abstraction and go deeper. You end up having to scrap the project or just give up on certain things. Bubble's "language" can't do looping, for instance. You can apparently write snippets of Javascript to do other stuff, but then you're back to needing to learn programming again.
Cobol had that idea, and Applescript took it farther. For example:
tell application "Safari" to activate
"Looking like a natural language" doesn't make the language easier to use, at least until we have AI compilers.