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

news.ycombinator.com

171–180 of 404 posts

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

#171
computers have become way more pervasive and basic coding actually isn't that hard. i think that maybe for all the hassles it creates when things get complicated, it may be secondary to next generation ides that make coding easier along with a general population that grows evermore tech savvy and ready to learn with each passing year.

tldr; i think it solves yesterday's problem. people today are both more willing and more able to learn basic coding skills. the hard part for both visual environments and high level languages is getting the abstractions right for the building blocks and i think it's an easier problem with the expressiveness of text.

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

#172

I have been a software engineer for a long time, C++ for the first half, and web development for the second. Recently I took a job as a contract developer for a large no code company. I had no idea what to expect and thought I was going to be limited to creating toy UI apps. I have been blown away at what I can accomplish in this platform. Virtually anything that can be done by a software engineer via languages like…

Sounds a lot like the platform i've been working in for the last year or so (coming from a pretty hard code software engineering background for the last 15 years) and continually finding it surprisingly capable. Do you mind to share the name of the platform?

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

#173
I hate it.

Some time (not long) ago I was working remotely on some software that was driven by an API on a remote server maintained by some folks in a different country. A long way from me.

Cutting a long story short I realised that the lack of control over the server was because they really did not know how it worked, or how to fix it or diagnose issues their server was having.

It was a laraval/MS-SQL system built from building blocks supplied by Microsoft. They wired all the blocks together in a GUI and look! It works!

* Putting images into a UU-encoded text field worked for images 10MB

* Low levels of activity it was reliable. Under load it randomly dropped sessions.

* They did not seem to know what logging was, or how to use it. I was supplying them with problem reports, carefully noting the time - and getting ghosted. I realised they had no way of knowing what their software was doing, or did. They could only set it up to do what they hoped.

* The stored times as wall clock time strings "2019-02-12T03:02:12.123" No time zone included. Time series data worth a lot of money. "What happens when daylight savings repeats an hour or skips one?" I asked. No answer. This infected the whole system. I spent a lot of time fighting dates, and was that in the past? Future? Is that supposed to be now?

Back in 1997 we had more reliable, and higher quality software, on a telehoused 486 Apache/Perl/Postgres system. But we compiled it from source and edited the configuration files by hand.

"No code" might be OK for Aunties cookie recipes, but for building infrastructure it is rot

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

#174
post #172

I have been a software engineer for a long time, C++ for the first half, and web development for the second. Recently I took a job as a contract developer for a large no code company. I had no idea what to expect and thought I was going to be limited to creating toy UI apps. I have been blown away at what I can accomplish in this platform. Virtually anything that can be done by a software engineer via languages like…

Sounds a lot like the platform i've been working in for the last year or so (coming from a pretty hard code software engineering background for the last 15 years) and continually finding it surprisingly capable. Do you mind to share the name of the platform?

---Redacted---

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

#175

I have been a software engineer for a long time, C++ for the first half, and web development for the second. Recently I took a job as a contract developer for a large no code company. I had no idea what to expect and thought I was going to be limited to creating toy UI apps. I have been blown away at what I can accomplish in this platform. Virtually anything that can be done by a software engineer via languages like…

Can you suggest some tools that you really like in this space? You got me intrigued about automatically integrating an API. I want to do this + small amounts of scraping for side projects but even as a 'developer' I cannot drag myself to start the IDE after hours so many project ideas just languish in the back of my head.

EDIT: oh sorry you posted the response just as soon as I posed this question. What a coincidence!

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

#177
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…

There's a second version of the unhappy path, as well: you're trying to use the tool for what it's good for, but there's a bug that makes your particular use case unnecessarily difficult. At worst, what happens is you silently either get bad results or lose data. At best, you either don't use the tool for that purpose until the bug is fixed, or, you implement some silly workaround. All in all, this can be a rather disempowering situation for a non-technical user, which is the exact opposite of what "no code" promises.

TL;DR: "no code" is just somebody else's code. You're introducing a massive external dependency you have little control over by using a "no code" solution.

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

#178

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).

Ms-Access says Hello :)

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

#179
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a lot like the platform i've been working in for the last year or so (coming from a pretty hard code software engineering background for the last 15 years) and continually finding it surprisingly capable. Do you mind to share the name of the platform?

---Redacted---

Darn, it seems like they are not something a regular consumer can just buy and use. Guessing something that good wouldn't be appropriate for consumer environments. :/

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

#180

Maybe ask some of these people: 1 hour before you Ask HN: Do you like the term 'nocode'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29187754 2 days ago Ask HN: No Code GUI Tools? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160858 3 months ago Ask HN: Is there any future for low-code/no-code development? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150056 4 months ago Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools? https://news.yc…

Thanks for posting these. I did see these threads before posting this Ask HN. However in most of those threads there wasn't much discussion at all.

I'm finding the comments in the current thread quite enriching to be honest.

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