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Comment by mjirv | Hacker News Reader

This is super cool and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I support our finance team, and an easy way to create a GUI around API calls to our different systems would be great to automate/make self-service tasks that are really manual or that only I can do today as a programmer.

Right now I'd typically spin up a quick rails and/or react app for that, so I'm excited to see how Anvil compares. Personally I wish it supported Ruby, but I understand why you'd start with Python.

The number of tools that try to do something like this keeps growing (Bubble comes to mind, or Appian in a slightly more enterprise space), and for good reason. This space is all about execution really--I suspect within the next 5 years or so it'll become pretty easy and mainstream for semi-technical folks to easily create a web app, and I'll be interested to see what that solution looks like.

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I work using something like Appian but even more enterprisey. I've watched non-technical users try and build something in it and they basically can't. What you end up with is the worst of both worlds. Non-technical users can't build in it and the features that are meant for them to use just end up slowing down developers. Effectively, whatever you build to replace a programming language eventually will be as complex as the programming language.

The learning curve of programming is steep. It's like a sheer wall and then a steady increasing line. It takes a beginner a ton of effort to produce anything in something like Rails. But once they get passed that initial hurdle over time they will be able to build more and more complex apps. Something like Appian, that initial sheer wall is far less steep, but still formidable. After you get passed that, however, you will fairly quickly find some thing Appian doesn't provide an easy way to do. At that point, you hit the sheer wall again and can even find yourself with something that isn't possible to do.

I think everyone identifies that replacing excel with web apps is a huge need with a lot of potential for monetization. The issue is that the biggest reason that non-technical users can do stuff in excel is that they have spent years to decades learning how. It's a tough sell for them to do the same in your app unless it is an industry standard.

Thanks! Yes, that kind of "wrap an API call in 5 minutes" thing is a great way to get started with Anvil :)

> The number of tools that try to do something like this keeps growing (Bubble comes to mind, or Appian in a slightly more enterprise space)...

This is an interesting comparison. Those tools focus on building apps without code. That's great for simple things, but once you get more complicated, you end up writing something that's kinda-sorta a program, in a language not really built for the purpose.

I think there's room for both. But as far as we're concerned, when you're telling a computer what to do, there is nothing better than writing actual code. And so Anvil is unapologetically built around a real, industrial-strength programming language, with a solid ecosystem of libraries and tools. We've had startups scale into the millions of dollars of revenue with products built on Anvil, with serious technical heft on the back end. We work quite hard at the architecture so it can grow with even the most demanding applications.

Bubble seems cool for non programmers, but I'm not convinced it will be faster for people who can code. Have you had a chance to play with it?

Appian looks really nice and has $90 and $180 plans, which is great. It's so weird though, you can't just give them money. They make you wait 3+ days for a human to say "ok fine, we'll take your money", if you ever get a response. So far, I've tried twice and they still have never responded / activated an account. I get it with the mendix/outsystems/salesforce super enterprise stuff in terms of lead qualification but at the low appian price points, I do not get it. Have you had a chance to try appian? It looks very promising albeit perhaps a bit over complicated.

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