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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?

#211

Post by karmakaze »

It relates to a lot of things. One thing like telephone adoption "at this rate, everyone will need to be an operator" and then we had self-dial phones instead of switchboard operators. So for simple often done things people can do it themselves. For other rare/special things we can still call for an operator (we still have those right?)

Another way to look at it is like computer architecture. We have technologies for holding data and impedance mismatches between them, so we make intermediary caches, integrated/hybrid devices and devices start blending to look like each other 3D XPoint/NVMe. On another scale a Facebook datacentre can look like a macroscale computer architecture. My point is that 'programming' and programmers started out being one thing, but there will be many different forms of this at many levels, in various vertical areas. We already have specialized platform (Shopify) programmers, and self-serve (Zapier/Airtable) and even among those there could be third-party helpers as has happened around Google sheets data collectors/analyzers. Lo-code/no-code is so many things. It comes back to 'any sufficiently capable configuration schema becomes a lisp'. People want to tweak, so they learn to program.

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

#212

Post by AnimalMuppet »

wonderwonder wrote: post #164
ethbr0 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

OK, but web development is an area that jerf would probably classify as "solved".

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

#214

Post by darkwater »

jbjbjbjb wrote: post #110
divbzero wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a great example of how “low code” or “no code” are recent buzzwords for a long continuing evolution. There have long been attempts to make software development more accessible. Some attempts stuck (Crystal Reports 1984, Excel 1987, WordPress 2003, IFTTT 2010) while others did not (HyperCard 1987, FrontPage 1995). The same will be true for the current crop of platforms.

Seems like you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

I don't agree: Frontpage was definitely a villain.

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

#215

Post by WJW »

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).

Isn't that just basically Rails? It has a (pretty good) built-in ORM, prettified CRUD on any of the tables managed through that ORM and making SQL queries on a cron schedule is possible through Rake tasks, which come preinstalled with the framework.

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

#216

Post by pjc50 »

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.

By the standards of the time when even macro assemblers weren't always available and programmers often had to do the translation to machine code manually, it was unlike code. It was even portable!

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

#217

Post by can16358p »

It will probably solve simple problems as it will enable "no-coders" to actually do things really without any code with AI-assisted-visual-drag-and-drop "coding". But that doesn't seem like to take off for any serious work soon. It might be a gateway for beginners to perform some simple tasks and to start actual programming by diving in though.

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

#218

Post by can16358p »

darkwater wrote: post #214
jbjbjbjb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

I don't agree: Frontpage was definitely a villain.

Not as villain as Dreamweaver. Not directly but considering how MS saw that has no future and abandoned it, while Dreamweaver became the "web dev tool" for many, many out there for long years until Adobe understood those tools had no future at all.

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

#219

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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. SQL. HyperCard. Visual Basic. Spreadsheets. Yeah, same song, next verse.

In some ways it's like AI, though. Once it succeeds (at what it can do), then it no longer is "no code", it's just it's own niche. (We don't think of SQL or spreadsheets as "no code" any more; we think of them as their own categories.)

I mean, spreadsheets are not nothing. They're useful for a segment of things. They didn't replace web programming or embedded real-time or machine learning, though.

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

#220

Post by pjc50 »

vadfa wrote: post #58
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…

>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. Today I was thinking about Visual Basic 6, which worked more or less the same way. I wonder what similar alternatives we have today? Gambas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas

You can do "drag and drop form elements and type up the event handlers" with Visual Studio and C#. The problem is that Microsoft have rather lost their way on GUI frameworks - too many of them and the latest ones are either "to be obsolete" or "not finished yet" (winui3), and winui3 has broken the interactive designer.

Theoretically it can be multi-platform https://platform.uno/

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