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Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#131

Post by seltzered_ »

donquichotte wrote: post #17

> Is this a paradigm shift? Graphical "low-code" programming has been around for a long time in e.g. the control systems community, where people typically have strong math am physics backgrounds (e.g., knowledge of vehicle dynamics), but little experience with programming or software engineering. Matlab Simulink and LabVIEW are well-known products that offer a low code approach to these fields. Large and complex proj…

I would like to hear more from people wrestling with labVIEW projects of sufficient complexity. My (albeit decade-ago) experience is they lack the communities and subtoolings and things break at a point of complexity, thus the "wrestling with the tools" that could help clean things up gets harder when using a no-code flow-based environment.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#132

Post by reureu »

I've been pitched on no-code data solutions in healthcare for over a decade, and it never seems to work out. At least in that space, people confuse who their main audience is: I don't want to use a no-code solution because I can code, and most of my stakeholders won't use a no-code solution because it wasn't code that was their barrier (it was time, specialization, analytic skills-- that's why they hire me). So I just watch vendors pitch me on how much easier my life would be if I could drag and drop analytic pipelines (lol, no.), or I watch them pitch doctors on how they can train their own machine learning models.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#133

Post by tqwhite »

I have been a professional programmer for forty years. In the eighties, there was a no-code desktop relational database application called Helix. I continue to think that it belongs on the same shelf as Excel in the UI hall of fame.

Like Excel, people made applications with it. Unlike Excel, it created a server product in the mid-eighties that allowed it to become an IT platform. Small business owners who had hacked up a Helix database to help with invoicing were able to extend the function to the entire organization without ever using a keyboard for anything except typing label names on reports. All drag-and-drop icon stuff.

Fast forward twenty-five years. Today the applications have grown and grown and grown. The owners who created them are old, prosperous and tired of screwing around with it. Also, Helix is no longer well supported. These people are screwed.

I consult for a few companies that use it. These apps are exact replicas of the brain process of the owner that made them without a single structured thought in sight. Even if Helix were a healthy platform, the apps are largely unmaintainable.

They are also so complicated and so deeply integrated into the companies that they represent a horrible threat. They can't easily adapt to the modern world and will cost millions to replace.

Which is to say, these no-code systems encourage amateurs to reach too far. I advise people against them.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#134

Post by GordonS »

ethbr0 wrote: post #112
jl6 wrote: post #42

This is an imperfect analogy, but consider for a moment the role Microsoft Excel plays. Excel allows non-coders to do many useful things, and provides a relatively gentle on-ramp to actual code via formulas. If you take that on-ramp and keep going, towards VBA and add-ins and other pieces of Microsoft technology, you might wind up becoming a full-time software developer, leaving Excel behind and using “real” tools. N…

> Excel allows non-coders to do many useful things I heard a great quip at some point: "Why is Excel the most useful IDE?" Answer: "Because it's the one IDE every business allows every user to access." Most of us here have forgotten that many businesses flat out ban access to programming tools for the majority of users. And what is an enterprising user to do, when they realize they're performing the same process 100…

I definitely think that's a large part of it, but I saw impressive uses of Excel and Access by non-coders long before it was typical to lock-down workstations the way corporations do nowadays (like, 20 years ago).

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#135

Post by brazzy »

andrewstuart wrote: post #130
jerf wrote: post #10

It's interesting, but always calibrate their claims against the fact this is about the tenth time this movement has come around. This movement literally goes back to COBOL. That is not a typo. It's not only likely older than you are, but probably much older than you are. I recognize COBOL may not seem like "no-code", but that's just because "no-code" is a stupid label. "No-code" doesn't mean "no code" just like "serv…

COBOL is code - it's not nocode.

It was sold as "basically English, so programmers are obsolete since everyone can write their own software". Which is pretty much the same pipe dream as "no code".

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#136

Post by GordonS »

mikewarot wrote: post #57

The ultimate "low code" experience I had was back in the 1990s with Delphi. You drag and drop your form elements, get everything just right. Next you hook up your event handlers and type in a few lines of code to do the actual work. It was the best I've ever seen balance of managing complexity, yet letting you write code when you needed to. The C++ version was nowhere near as god, it generated a ton of templates and…

I used Delphi a lot in the 90's and early 00's, but I never really considered it "low code", with the exception of the drag and drop forms designer of course.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#137

Post by _trampeltier »

ethbr0 wrote: post #112
jl6 wrote: post #42

This is an imperfect analogy, but consider for a moment the role Microsoft Excel plays. Excel allows non-coders to do many useful things, and provides a relatively gentle on-ramp to actual code via formulas. If you take that on-ramp and keep going, towards VBA and add-ins and other pieces of Microsoft technology, you might wind up becoming a full-time software developer, leaving Excel behind and using “real” tools. N…

> Excel allows non-coders to do many useful things I heard a great quip at some point: "Why is Excel the most useful IDE?" Answer: "Because it's the one IDE every business allows every user to access." Most of us here have forgotten that many businesses flat out ban access to programming tools for the majority of users. And what is an enterprising user to do, when they realize they're performing the same process 100…

100 x this. Most companys ban all kind of software. So Excel is the only solution for really all kind of problems.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#138

Post by ThalesX »

God I'd love it so much if 'idea people' could use some sort of no-code tool to get their idea 80% of the way there, so I can start cracking on the remaining 20%, or even not at all.

This would really clear me up for valuable work instead of having to rehash the same quick fixes for broken data modeling paterns.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?

#140

Post by PeterisP »

GordonS wrote: post #136
mikewarot wrote: post #57

The ultimate "low code" experience I had was back in the 1990s with Delphi. You drag and drop your form elements, get everything just right. Next you hook up your event handlers and type in a few lines of code to do the actual work. It was the best I've ever seen balance of managing complexity, yet letting you write code when you needed to. The C++ version was nowhere near as god, it generated a ton of templates and…

I used Delphi a lot in the 90's and early 00's, but I never really considered it "low code", with the exception of the drag and drop forms designer of course.

It depends very much on what functionality you needed.

If you needed a GUI for database CRUD operations (which is a lot of business processes and a lot of webapps now), then you could do that with nearly zero code, as the built-in behavior was all that you needed, but if you needed some interesting custom script and just a button "run it" and a textbox for results, then of course that would be nearly all your own code.

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