[deleted]
Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#12'no code' usually does not just refer to a different type of editor, like a visual widget composer. It usually implies the creation and specification an now be done by a person that does not need coding skills.
The latter is not impossible, but there is a tradeoff. As computers have endless capabilities, a hue number of design choices need to be specified in order to select/create the specific outcome desired.
This required information need can for the end programmer/designer be reduced by shrinking the potential design space through premade implicit descisions. Creating a 'stopwatch' app from scratch starting with a blinking cursor in an empty text file will require a lot more specification than creating it in a dedicated graphical stopwatch designer where all that is still needed is specifying the color of the start/stop button, but the former leaves you endless more possibilities than the latter.
Getting the above tradeoff right usually runs into the 80/20 situation. You can live with 80% of the choices made, they cover 80% of your needs, but for the rest...
And now your non-coder runs into a problem. Not only is the skillet promise now void, the higher level abstraction made in the 'no code' model is not crisply delineated, so the coder brought in to finish the job now has to understand the complexities of the code underlying the abstraction where the design tradeoffs were chosen not in favor of this under the hood meddling.
A similar problem occurs when a bug or unforeseen configuration breaks the no code veil. This is referred to as the 'leaky abstraction' problem.
In the end usually you still need a coder that understands the lower level. And specifitions for highly open systems are more efficient conveyed and maintained through textual 'code' than through other types of graphical editors.
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#13Pure no code in the current form may never catch on. I wrote something on No code this Sunday https://technotes.substack.com/p/no-code-the-revolution-that...
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#14I'm working on a "low" code platform for developers (use your IDE, write in the generated code, iterate / redesign / regen )
Docs are a bit MIA, so I haven't pushed it much yet, but you can check out the lib/gen dir and the Cue files for examples. I'm very curious to hear what more developers with strong opinions about low code think.
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#15What are the common users and use cases of no code? I feel like it's well worth the investment to spend a year or 2 learning serious programming or just hiring a team if someone wants to get into the software space so kind of confused by the movement
A lot of non devs use it for Business Process Automation. Dashboards and forms for smaller data sets / processes mainly
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#16If the technology for interactive web front ends were to somehow slow or stop changing rapidly... maybe that could happen. But it hasn't and I'm not sure we're there yet. And no code I don't think has taken over the desktop world yet has it? That's a hell of a lot more mature area front end wise.
Just wait until AR like the Hololens 2 comes out, all of UX and design changes.
Some examples are 3d fonts and signage, interfaces without windows (widgets just float wherever), whole new deaths of UI elements and building blocks. Oh, and the mouse is gone in favor of hand tracking and the most amazing digital interaction I have ever experienced. One week in and my mind is still blown by the possibilities.
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#17My experience with " no code" reinforces the issues raised in ex other comments, with a little emphasis to add: If you never learned your times tables, then used a calculator, imbedded calculation loops are tricky to troubleshoot . " no code" layers this more deeply, creating a very large number of programming code lines, function calls and subroutines on interpreted code that runs slow anyway. It can be difficult to…
Not all low code platforms use interpretation or dynamic code creation. I work on one which is language agnostic / polyglot (see other comment here) and have seen more examples from other devs / competitor demos. You can think of this probably more like code gen for stubs, but one place to write in Cue and multiple tech / language outputs (for our Hof tool).
You are right about the complexity hiding and difficulty therein. It's part of the reason ours is open source.
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#18No-code means programming without text , it doesn't remove complexity, only abstracts it away, covering it with some visual programming GUI. Here's some problems that I can think of with visual programming: - Version control: Not only the logic of the system, but the shape of the visual representation needs to be tracked... along with a lot of other metadata. - Debugging: Visual programs need yet another step of comp…
Would love to hear your thoughts on our "low code for devs" as I have tried to eliminate many of (my shared) complaints about low code as a dev. Text based so you can use your IDE and terminal
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
(sorry to post link twice in same topic, but seems helpful.to have it in the two spots more than not)
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#19No-code means programming without text , it doesn't remove complexity, only abstracts it away, covering it with some visual programming GUI. Here's some problems that I can think of with visual programming: - Version control: Not only the logic of the system, but the shape of the visual representation needs to be tracked... along with a lot of other metadata. - Debugging: Visual programs need yet another step of comp…
> Version control
The other day I tried to reverse engineer a lego mindstorm program from a pan across it in a youtube video(stitching together screenshot frames with Hugin panorama editor), only to find that that visual language was dependent of a silverlight app, and OSX had deprecated it, so I could only use scratch to re-create the logic. Then the scratch editor crashed and corrupted my project file, which when opened in a text editor was just a big encoded data blob. So I started from scratch and took to copying the file (file (1), file (2)..) every so often.. I did not feel like the future to me..
Re: Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?
#20I think one of my favorite HN comment from this past year [1] addresses this a bit:
> Software has really interesting economics where as the cost/feature decreases by a factor, say 1x, then the set of features that can be profitably worked on expands by like 10x, so paradoxically, as cost/feature decreases, it makes sense to hire more engineers and expand R&D budgets.
"No code" is part of this, IMO. If a "no code" tool made certain things easier (e.g. building a landing site with some functionality), then the business starts to see the next set of features that can/should now be built because that previous problem was solved, that can't be done with a "no code" solution and needs some R&D effort to build out. The cycle continues as "no code" tools get more advanced to cover those use cases, and then more new business use cases will come out as a result of having those new tools in place.