No-code Bubble raises $100M to make technical co-founders obsolete | Hacker News Reader

No-code Bubble raises $100M to make technical co-founders obsolete

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23 pointssanta_boy24 comments

I find it fascinating that the no code idea keeps coming up. As every developer can attest, most managers, business analysts et al, have no clue of what they actually want, let alone on how to implement it.

That's not even counting technical challenges, architecture, complex networks, redundancy etc. Ironically I think the back end would be even harder with a no code solution.

In reality what I predict is that languages will become a little bit more "loose", lazy typing, argument defaults will become the norm. I also think that the IDE quick lists will be more aggressive in their input, almost like a helper library, where you can say bubble sort and it will setup the code to do it.

Human flaws aside, from a corporate stand point lock in can be bad, and all no/low code solution lock you in. This industry tends to go circular in terms of technology adoption. It sounds good, find out that it's expensive and can't control your own product and you opt out.

> In reality what I predict is that languages will become a little bit more "loose", lazy typing, argument defaults will become the norm.

That misses the point completely. Beginners are annoyed at the rigorousness of programming languages, but the rigorousness is there as a helper for correctness.

I don’t find the idea that fraudulent at all. In all seriousness, who wants to scaffold a dumb (not pejoratively), but an actual low effort rest api via code? Aren’t we all over that at this point?

And who wants to set up the React or Angular form that’s going to hit this literal dumb api? I’m kind of over it, I’d very much like to drag arrows around lol.

So eventually, we're going to have a Web based version of Visual Basic 6, and the circle will be complete.

ok but they all have ideas and they are closer to the money, so of course they want to sell the idea of no code (which likely means theyll just farm out actual code to india)

i see as an attempt by a small co tigent of coders to sell some tranches of a SaaS as cheap as possible.

Salesforce is the perfect cautionary tale to any manager who wants a "no code" solution. You either adapt your business to fit it perfectly, or you end up in contractor hell with an unmaintainable soup of custom integrations.

> end up in contractor hell

Paying 3x what it would have cost if you'd just gone with a "yes code" solution.

The thing is, yes-code can also become an albatross for some companies.

I can tell you right now we pay too much money to build table based apps and user forms. No-code tools should remove the need to build stuff like that, which even developers don’t want to keep making at this point.

When you have an entire team of agile managers, designers, devs to set up a query that populates a table, you sort of have already lost sight of the forest for the trees.

Umm, did they start as no-code? I first encountered it as The Platform with equivalents for database, serverless, cron, app center and more.

> Among Silicon Valley circles, a fun parlor game is to ask to what extent world GDP levels are held back by a lack of computer science and technical training.

Typical Silicon Valley hubris.

Imagine how high GDP would grow if we had millions more <literally every skilled field in existence>?

They also make the same mistake our clueless political leaders and media make when they tell unemployed coal miners to "learn to code". As if we can just take any person of median intelligence and ambition, send them to bootcamp, and they'll be intrinsic in building the next Google search or Hadoop or some other other product that probably has greatly improved output per worker.

Even if software engineering was more respected in our society, and the "best and brightest" who currently go into more prestigious and lucrative fields like finance, medicine, law, policy, etc. were enticed into tech, I'm not so sure you'd see all those extra apps and lines of code translate into improved GDP. Instead, you'd just end up with an arms race between even more big companies to steal marketshare from each other.

Having used Bubble I'm not too worried :-)

The idea that "No-code" means what it says, or can deliver what it promises (without kicking the can down the road... in a VERY major way) -- or that even if it did, it magically eliminates the need to have, if not a technical co-founder, or at least a highly clueful technical person on board, at some point in the early stages (before too much damage is done) --

Is something that only a non-technical "technology writer" could put serious stake in.

Has anyone ever uses Salesforce marketing cloud? You can build emails drag and drop. And the code it creates is…ok. You can even use the UI to do fairly ok dynamic content.

You can build data tables with the UI. It’s…ok. You can do very simple joins and fairly complex filtering with the UI. The filters are actually good so long as you only need the one table. After that they’re…ok

And then there are Journeys. You can orchestrate complex communication streams with the UI. I’d go so far as to say it’s good. Until you need to do an action not built into the UI…then you need to code it :)

All of the same goes for most of the other “low” code or “no” code tools I’ve used like AirTable. They can do a lot. And what they can do they’re usually between ok and good at.

But so far I’ve not seen one that is excellent. Back to the marketing cloud example if you want to make a table in the UI with 10 columns sure. But what about 100? It would be a huge pain or you can write a script and do it in minutes.

I’m sure Bubble is fine. But so far none of these solutions have ever wowed me. But then again like some folks point out I’m not the target audience really.

Are these no-code solutions essentially Microsoft Access forms, but with a hosted database and mobile and web clients?

They also have drag-and-drop executable flowcharts built in. Undebuggable, unversionable, non-reusable executable flowcharts. They're as useful as you'd guess.

Yeah, and the small minority that manage to become bigger than a trivial app and become useful, become spaghetti diagrams of flow chart mess, so unmaintainable and fragile, nobody can modify it after “that guy” leaves.

Then the whole thing has to be rewritten and maintained by an actual developer, and the whole exercise ends up being much more expensive

I don't know what Bubble is trying to do, but it's certainly no where near as good as Access for data manipulation. In Access I can create all the tables I want, all the fields I want, define queries based on table relations, complex forms that let you show/edit/add data based on your complex data joins and subforms, and reports. In Bubble, I don't see any way to do this easily. I can't even create a datasheet without a plugin.

It's a big market though. There are other options, like www.knack.com, that are more like Access and better for data manipulation.

The irony to me is this statement:

> How many startups could be built if hundreds of thousands or even millions more people could code and bring their entrepreneurial ideas to fruition? How many bureaucratic processes could be eliminated if developers were more latent in every business? The answer, of course, is on the order of “a lot,”

While tools are great, the problem still remains that we need more people with useful tech skills - specifically CS skills. I've been working on this problem for a year or so at my side-project Qvault.io

https://qvault.io/

The greatest irony of this is that Bubble is a highly technical platform built, as it must be, by developers, software architects, and technical co-founders.

I don't think drag-n-drop, workflow-diagram type of application builders are ever going to replace devs.

WordPress is probably the killer "no-code" app builder, and that has actually eaten a lot of the bottom out of web development. People can do their landing pages, eCommerce, media companies, etc. without needing a professional.

>"No-code Bubble raises $100M to make technical co-founders obsolete"

PDS: I love this title a lot! <g>. That is because in theory, an infinite series of "Companies that make other companies obsolete" -- could be created!

Sort of like Hilbert's Infinite Hotel Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...)...

You have a company that makes technical co-founders obsolete...

But then you have a company that makes that company that makes technical co-founders obsolete, obsolete itself!

Then of course, you have yet another company -- that makes that previous one obsolete!

The whole thing is like a house of cards or a series of dominoes -- Disruptive Technology A takes out Disruptive Technology B -- which has already taken out Disruptive Technology C (well, I guess it wasn't that disruptive, if it got taken out itself! <g>).

You know, make the "obsoleters" -- the obsolete ones! <g>

And of course, this can apply not just to any business, but to any group or organization as well!

Including foreign governments!

In other words, why topple or destablize foreign governments -- when you could just create a better one -- and just make the other ones obsolete? <g>

I could just picture myself signing up for the CIA:

Me: "Yes, I'd like to topple or destabilze foreign governments -- where do I sign up?"

CIA: "Oh no, sorry, we don't do that anymore -- that was what we did in the 1950's Cold War Cuban Missle Crisis era... but in 2021 we simply obsolete foreign governments! <g> And once they're obsolete, no one cares about them anymore!" <g>

So, philosophically, obsolescence and its relationship to Disruptive Technology, and technology which Disrupts -- the previous Disruptive Technology!

And, for how many iterations -- how many disruptions of the disrupters, how many making obsolescences of the obsolete makers -- is sustainable?

And, who will be the "last man" (obsolescence-maker/disruptive company) -- standing?

And, all of this, as it relates to the Infinite Hotel Paradox! <g>

All submitted for your approval and/or bemusement, and/or approval! <g>

Disclaimer: All of above was written for comedy-writing purposes only! <g>

Build your own car, without any mechanical experience!

...and just pray it doesn't explode, fall part, or get repossessed (because actually someone else owns all its parts, you just welded them together)

todays day and age is low code/no code for modern webapps. This is nothing novel. Technical cofounders are still needed because at the end of the day, you still need someone to logic.

Ahh yes no code, the god that lied.

I don't understand why this is still a thing when Python plus a decent abstraction layer would get the same things done.

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