Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?

The web is, at it's heart, a distributed document system with a layer of hacks on top for building applications.

You can create pure documents for the web without any code. Documents are, by nature, easily expressed declaratively; and it's not impossible to build an intuitive interface to express declarative data visually (or hide the data aspect completely in the case of a WYSIWYG interface).

Modern web pages are, in my mind, a sort of document/application hybrid (with few exceptions as of 2020). We have yet to find a better way to express an application than through textual code.

Procedural code is branching and time sequenced; how do you express that in a meaningful way visually? For some reason our imaginations find it easy to understand that the side effects of every line before this one are still around, and we're pretty good at picking up the concept of branching and jumping around the instructions; but I believe that's because the code is essentially a sequenced list of commands (and our brains are good with sequenced lists).

The attempts I've seen at visual programming remove common programming capabilities to fit more neatly within their visual medium; as long as that is the case, I don't see visual programming breaking out of being used strictly in DSLs (domain specific languages), which are often inherently limited.

I don't think a no code future is likely, as long as custom software is in demand; however I can see a future where fewer technician type roles require code. Of course that would require someone to spend a lot of money building a standard visual vocabulary of related tasks, excellent ergonomic interfaces, and extensible GUI systems; the type of things the FOSS world hasn't built much of a community for as far as I am aware.

I think no/low code stuff has its place. For example, our product guy can build our landing page using Webflow and doesn't need to bug the devs, who can focus on actually coding our product.

Would we consider a no code product to build the fundamental pieces or our actual product? Likely not based on the tools I've tried over the years.

Wish it wasn't so though. The disconnect/handover from design to implementation is still a bottleneck. Tools like Figma offer ways to export CSS, etc. but that's not really the main pain. The real time sync is in coordination, iteration, time spent on designs that change out from underneath you, etc.

Or, as happens a lot in no/low code but also in code-heavy (normal) development is that this 'corner case' feature is just taken out of scope. That eliminates it too as well as a technical solution does.

Basically; you can run a rather medium sized company on google docs or ms office or a bunch of trivial crud apps hacked in php/AD; I know rather a scary amount of companies that do work like that. They are not the biggest companies (I know of at least one that has well over 150m revenue/year for the past 20 years; most others are smaller) but they also spend almost nothing on (that kind of) IT and it works. The corner cases are removed from the business process instead of hacked into the IT flow.

In my mind, "no code" doesn't really exist. All that exists are different programming languages, some of which are visual and require less learning. You could, principally, design a no-code web app IDE that could build whatever website you like; but that doesn't remove the complexity of building it, it's simply expressed in a different way. Seeing programming as some nuisance is, IMHO, the wrong mindset; it's the very process that transforms requirements and expectations into a product. True "no-code" would require human-level (or at least very advanced) AI systems. Of course, for very low-complexity systems, you can define a graphical programming language that abstracts away most of the technical details (e.g. Dreamweaver, stuff like Wix), but even that is a very primitive form of programming. Excel is also a form of programming.

Also, I don't really get the hostility for code as a textual format. Text has a number of advantages that just haven't been replicated; it's a very compact format, reasonably standardized, can easily be refactored and can be universally edited. Also, I don't think it hinders learning about programming; learning the programming language syntax is the easiest part, IME. It took me about 4 weeks when I was 14 to learn Java. Learning how to solve problems with the language is a whole different ballgame and that wouldn't be solved by having a graphical programming language. There are cases where it is advantageous (e.g. Excel), but for the majority of use-cases, I think you'll find it hard to get more productivity with a graphical format.

> businesses being built on top of a pile of Excel spreadsheets.

But, "=SUM(A1:A10)" is code. Spreadsheets have a visual layout and mental model different from other programming languages, but they are code none the less.