Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I watched the demo video. It looks like what the Visual Basic form builder was for Windows programming in the 90s.

However it will be difficult for non programmers. The very first dialog about Google Maps has menus "API provider" and "Query". I wonder how many non programmers know what they are. They can take a guess and learn but maybe this is still too low level. The second example is about building a login form by configuring its input fields. Maybe adding a completely configured dialog would be good enough for non programmers. Programmers can edit the details. Same for every other component.

However I remember that non programmers didn't use Visual Basic, as easy as it was. Programmers did. Some non programmers built sites on MySpace some 10 years after VB, then wrote on various blog platforms and configured themes, then ended up on Facebook and other non programmable social media platforms. Outside the Web the most used non-programmers programming tool is still probably Excel. I've seen amazing stuff build there from people who couldn't write a two lines script in Python.

Your comment sounds like something straight out of a Show HN, not a thread about a 5 year old service with 100,000 users and $100k in monthly revenues.

There's obviously a big demand for this so either you're wrong or people using it are actually programmers.

> people using it are actually programmers

Kind of wouldn't surprise me if the user numbers had a decent sized (probably not majority) programmer contingent; these kinds of services are a good way to get a quick prototype out, before you legit build something.

I agree. I've seen people discussing sketching out an MVP with Bubble.is and I can see how something like this could be useful to put together a demo.

I can imagine that this does appeal to programmers as I imagine some companies have already built internal tools to the same affect for rapid prototyping.

I just took a quick look at it and GP has a simple misunderstanding here. When they say you don't have to be a coder that doesn't mean the target market is my girlfriend who has no interest in this whatsoever(she's a doctor).

The target market is those people that sit in places like the AWS loft or places like that, listen to tech talks and wish they had a coder to build their ideas for free.

Most of them already know what an API is. Even if you don't use the external data sources, what bubble provides is somewhat enough to win hackathons and get funding provided you can present and sell.

I've seen a bunch of traders, business people and otherwise people with random ideas that fit in that group. So yes, not at all surprised they make that much money.

From the people I've met in start ups so far, the most likely to use it would be Designers and Product people. The Product manager I work with knows what an API is, and could probably hack out a solution to something, but really prefers not to.

At what point do you call someone a programmer? They seem to be using "knowing how to code in a traditional programming language". However, I would not use that definition. Most of what we do though is thinking about a problem and how that relates to what computers do. My take would be that everyone actually using this tool either is a programmer or by the nature of what they're doing soon will be.

> Most of what we do though is thinking about a problem and how that relates to what computers do.

Ah... now, in my mind, you're getting into Software Engineer territory. Programmer, to me, simply means you know how to make a computer do what you want. That can be "knowing how to search for someone else's code that makes the computer do what you want" at times. Once you get into thinking about the problem and how that related to what computers do, you're getting out of that generic "programmer" term and into engineering.

I'd call my 7 year old C= 64 hacker self a programmer. The real distinction comes from being a professional or not.

If you are a pro, you would know the industry, the hardware, how things communicate, how and why to scale and report things at a higher level, because you've been exposed to the needs and wants of an Enterprise.

Programming isn't a mystical art that only a few wizards can learn. Millions of people write software to help themselves do their job in things like Applescript, VBA, Google Forms, etc every day. You don't need to have the title "developer" to understand and write code, even if the actual "code" itself is a few layers of abstraction away.

I agree.

But while not "F U money" $100k p/m is enough to say: Well someone must be using it then.

Perhaps, in the Hooked sense, the somewhat diffcult learning curve helps to increase long term retention?

How do you know it’s not FU money?

On annualized turnover you need at least one or two more zeros to reach F U status :)

I agree. Bubble is way too advanced for non-programmers to just “pick up”. I am not a programmer but worked as a product manager for several years and consider myself technically knowledgeable (can copy and paste basic code, I know how an API works, I can write basic scripts, basic html, I understand conceptually things like oauth etc) and I found bubble to be basically incomprehensible. I could probably learn it if I was willing to dedicate some serious hours to it, but for the business I am in (founder of a marketing agency) it’s much cheaper for my to just hire a programmer than to dedicate several weeks/months to learning bubble. I hear it’s great for programmers to speed up their workflow though.

> However it will be difficult for non programmers.

I work with non-programmers every day who know what APIs and queries are.

There are millions of people who are technical enough to manipulate Excel sheets, talk intelligently about API integrations, and tweak SQL queries but are not programmers themselves. Non-programmer does not automatically mean non-technical.

I've seen people that used Excel every day for decades and didn't know there was something like the '=' that displayed the contents of one cell on another.

They used it just for the tabular form.

But I agree with you on everything.

Maybe http://anvil.works would be better ? Going through the tutorials they have an intuitive interface.

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