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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?

#161

Post by jdavis703 »

To give an analogy to natural language, a lot of no-code users want to skip past learning the rules of Latin and jump straight in to writing a 1000 page treatise in Latin.

The problem with no-code is it generally appeals to a class of non-programmers who think programming is hard because of syntax. They don’t understand that coding is hard because it’s about understanding and solving hard problems that touch human computer interaction, legal/compliance and computer science domains (among others).

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

#162

Post by game_the0ry »

I think the actual question people are wondering is - will no-code take my job.

TLDR -- No-code / low-code are basically just SaSS - you still need hire and pay software engineers to build it and use it. I do not predict that it will become a threat to employment or compensation, ever. Longer answer below:

Some of you who remember a time when developing software was really, really hard. The tooling and docs have only gotten better, and the barrier to entry is lower than it ever has been before - it is now easier to become or switch careers (me) into development. Has the compensation for developers fallen? No, we have just gotten more productive, but the demand for software has gone up a lot.

No-code / low-code are tools, and tools do not tend to replace people, but people still need to build and use the tools. Did AWS, kubernetes / docker, and Jenkins make IT and sys-admin folks less valuable? No, they just learned the tools and leveled up - now we call that "devops" and they get paid well.

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

#163

Post by waxdotrun »

hackerbrother wrote: post #73

I think if someone made a decent auto-fullstack-web-CRUD app they would be very rich and would have solved a lot of no-code problems and saved us an amazing number of man-hours on internal tools. Just: SQL tables, prettified CRUD on those SQL tables on the frontend (with R/W permissions per user on tables), and reports (either on-the-fly or SQL queries run on a cron schedule).

We're (https://www.wax.run/) doing this. We expose a CRUD app for your existing database in Google Sheets. You can also call custom Python for anything not covered by SQL.

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

#164

Post by wonderwonder »

ethbr0 wrote: post #107
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…

Things we agree on: ignore everything no-code proponents say about their tools or capabilities Things we disagree on: code before no code My experience has been that actual code is always superior* to no-code, because no-code is always more complex. E.g. the no-code developer environment + code (in whatever designer form) + interpreter / runtime / libraries + any integrations + actual generated code. Consequently, bu…

I used to think this as well, that No Code was not a real development to production level option. I have very much been proven wrong. I transition recently from 15+ years as a developer to contracting for a no code platform. Virtually everything a regular web dev can do in code can be done in no code. Sometimes its easier to do in code and sometimes it is much easier to do in no code so mileage may vary but no code is very much a mature technology now that can produce applications to the same scale as regular web 2.0 coded software.

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

#165

Post by zulban »

People who cannot code get excited about technology trends and then have a fantasy that they can participate without working hard. It's called "no-code".

There's tons of advanced software tools on computers that do amazing things without code. We don't call it "no-code", we just call it using a computer.

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

#166

Post by monocasa »

brazzy wrote: post #135
andrewstuart wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah, if you look at it, it's designed after recipes, even more so than typical programming. It starts with a title of the module, then a data definition section (ingredients), and the the program section which is a numbered list of english phrases to be performed more or less in order.

The idea was to convert women who had been working _as_ computers, into programmers.

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

#168

Post by shireboy »

> Clearly these apps/platforms enable non-developers to solve a bunch of problems which would otherwise need a software engineer.

I'm not sure that's as clear as it seems at first. Everywhere I've been involved with them, the flow is like this:

1) Org sold on idea of no/low code tool, "business analyst can build things!" 2) Business analyst tries, fails to build things, calls dev 3) Dev figures it out, could have done similar in a few lines of code. Either a) becomes "expert" in tool or b) goes back to code

I'm not ready to rule them all out, and maybe I just worked with some inept business analysts. These tools are by their nature usually closed source/proprietary, but maybe there's some great ones. But I also wonder if it's not partially fundamental: maybe text is just more concise and expressive than visual paradigms for some problems - there's a reason we still have textbooks for some things.

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

#170

Post by wonderwonder »

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 remember Borland C++ builder being similar. Was actually pretty good to use.
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