
The future of programming is visual - adamlagreca
https://medium.com/inside-the-bubble/what-the-fuck-is-bubble-a919ef59a2f1
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osullivj
35 years ago I was getting into coding for the first time on Commodore Pets
and ZX81. I read about The Last One [1] in the computing press in 1981 and
thought that maybe the world won't need programmers. Well, the world needs
programmers more than ever, since demand for software is only increasing. It's
nice to hear that the dream of user generated systems is still alive. We've
had many iterations, from the The Last One, through Hypercard, Fabrik,
Scratch. It's a powerful vision, which is why people keep chasing it. But it
can only address well defined niches. Of course we have had a very powerful
end user software authoring system for some time. It uses a visual, grid
based, functional programming system and has powerful database and charting
features. It's called Excel.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-
th...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-the-last-one)

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sklogic
Saying that visual programming is the future is like saying that comic books
will eventually replace all that boring 'tl;dr' walls of text.

The truth is - people _think in text_. Visual abstractions are only suitable
for a tiny subset of things we're thinking about, and the rest is just too
complex to be expressed in anything but a natural, complex language.

~~~
adamlagreca
Yes, we think in text or, more accurately, a language. But only a small
percentage of us can think in code, yet software businesses will continue to
come online at exponential momentum. Having visual, drag and drop components
is more universally accessible. If computers actually began to understand how
we think (and by "we" I mean including those of us who aren't engineers), then
the future of innovation is open to everyone and that's ultimately the vision
of Bubble.

~~~
sklogic
> But only a small percentage of us can think in code

We always think in code. A plan for a day is a _code_ (and nobody ever use
graphical diagrams for it). A cooking recipe is a code (plain text, never a
diagram). A legal document is a code (I wish some of them were diagrams, but a
plain and unobfuscated English would have been even better). Pretty much any
form of communication is code. A one-dimensional sequence of words.

Yes, the existing coding languages are crap, they are simply not abstract
enough and not flexible enough. And this is what must be fixed. Representing
the same broken abstractions, but this time in 2D diagrams, won't fix
anything, or even make things worse. Been there already, with flow charts and
all that.

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the_af
This article is terrible. No, a "Bubble" programmer couldn't have made
Facebook back in the day. The vast majority of the difficulty in programming
doesn't lie in the _representation_ of code, but in the actual underlying
problems you're trying to solve -- and in knowing whether computers can solve
them at all, and how. Textual code is not the problem here.

Bubble is either too limited (meaning no, you cannot build the next Facebook
with it) or simply a visual skin over the fundamental problem that is software
development. If Bubble is powerful enough, then not anyone will be able to use
it to build complex systems, no matter how fancy the colorful UI you slap over
it.

It's as if the author of the article thought the complexity of Facebook lies
in choosing which color to use for the "like" button...

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seanmcdirmid
The future of programming could be more visual, but still very textual. It's
not a binary decision to make.

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ColinWright
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233410)

