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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo! Pipes tried this more than a decade ago, it's interesting to see that the dream of "apps my mom could build" never dies.

Except most people want to be consumers of applications, not creators. And those who really want to be creators they learn how to code. So, like with Pipes, I am not really sure who is the target audience here.

Microsoft Popfly[1] was another one from back in the days.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

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"apps my mom could build" kind of describes Excel workbooks. People effectively use excel to build (highly constrained) GUIs for processing data using custom logic that they specify themselves. And excel's popularity speaks for itself, it's completely pervasive. So that's the answer; the audience isn't programmers, it's the officeworkers all over the world currently using Excel to automate office tasks and want a better delivery mechanism than a shared Excel file on the office LAN. That's such a big pie that even capturing a small slice of it might be a reasonably profitable endeavor.

You are spot on. I know a ton of people who fit your description. I wish this were higher up the comment stack. So many people are missing this simple viewpoint.

I remember in 2002 when .NET came out they had a tool that turned UML into method stubs with pseudo-code, and I was sure that my career only had a few years left before it was fully automated away.

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