Am I right in understanding that Bubble is a GUI for building CRUD applications?
If so, great work! It shows there is a need for these simple, automated tools for building simple CRUD applications, and that it is possible for these to be built and automated.
We have had MS Access for years. It still requires a bit of knowledge about database design to use it properly.
I don't know Bubble but I am skeptical about visual programming, as syntax is one of the easier parts to learn when coding, and isn't in my opinion what makes our profession difficult.
IMHO visual programming should really aim more to be a scaffolding tool - so instead of replacing the syntax to focus more on speeding up the structuring of the code, helping you to easier manage and understand the blocks and the flow. Ideally it can then auto-generate the most of it and leave you to fine-tune the details of logic directly in the code (where it's faster and more expressive to be able to type the code directly).
Also if it's not in text, you can't use all the tools effectively, like diffing, versioning, to actually create reliable tools with few bugs. I'm very skeptical of graphical programming.
Unfortunately, there's a long history of graphical programming being foisted upon text-centric domains, which is just as bad as the reverse, so you're right to be skeptical. But if you shift perspective to another domain, graphical (or otherwise non-textual) programming becomes much more appealing.
For example: Game devs build themselves sandbox environments in which they can test out their physics engine, dynamic music systems, animation playback, etc. These sandboxes are like REPLs, but for non-textual data. One can imagine how much nicer it would be if the full system's code were represented first-class inside that sandbox, so that you were introducing and manipulating system abstractions close to the truest representation of the data, rather than having to leave the sandbox to go back to your text editor to make system tweaks, far away from the data.
Still skeptical about why that might be nice? Your text editor and terminal know nothing about the full, live representation of the data, so they do nothing to help you work in that domain. The nice things you get when working with text — diffs, versioning, etc — you don't get the physics engine / music engine / animation engine equivalents unless your code is somehow present in the same space as the live data.
Totally agree. LabView control structures become unwieldy messes of spaghetti quickly from what I have seen. Visual programming is good for some niches in electrical engineering, for example, RF processing chains. But trying to use it for general purpose programming seems to lead to more complicity, not less.
If so, great work! It shows there is a need for these simple, automated tools for building simple CRUD applications, and that it is possible for these to be built and automated.