Much ado about nothing
Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
221–230 of 404 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2) Unfortunately, there's a strong, likely frequently subconscious, incentive to definitely not do this, since it carries a strong danger of IT making itself "obsolete." I can't think of a single case that this has ever been the decision making process when creating a product. If you look at the myriad of available tools that trends in this direction, in all fields, you'll realize that the industry is littered with…
What? I can think of a ton egregious examples of deliberate "disempowering" right off the top, to say nothing of the likely TONS more subtle ones. Shutting down Hypercard. Google Reader. Bill Gates emphasizing to NOT make MS docs compatible with others. The list goes on and on.
How are any of these related to making IT obsolete?
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#223It 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…
> (we still have those right?)
I think there might still be operators to help setting up a call with a deaf person. Other than that, I had kind of assumed that the concept was obsolete. What would you need an operator for?
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#224Assembly -> ... -> Ruby -> Rails -> -> UIs to deal with framework abstractions
I think the 'no code' is just a marketing term to explain something that everyone here is familiar with: the tradeoffs of building with abstractions.
On the one hand, powerful abstractions to build-a-blog-in-15-mins. On the other, the decrease in flex/extensibility and the maintenance pains that come with using tools in unintended ways.
We'll get to a stage where we can build with VR-think-about-a-component-and-see-it-appear or w/e but we all know there's always inherent complexity that eventually requires going under the hood or just straight up reimplementing.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#225No code feels to me like an ORM like django. Conceptually easier but theres a ton of stuff done in the background that as soon as you want anything special you end up in a world of hurt.
Except in Django it doesn’t hurt, because the ability to send straight SQL to the DB is built in.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#226This 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…
I mostly agree. But I think there’s an important semantic distinction: people who use excel are coders. They are programming the moment they write an expression into a cell.
I think this is important because we fool ourselves by calling these people non-coders.
Excel is really just a coding environment that has a ridiculously smooth learning curve.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#227Not a paradigm shift.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#228> 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.
Actually part of the LHC collider is programmed in LabView.
https://www.apexwaves.com/blog/using-nis-pxi-hardware-to-con...
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#229Everything about no-code screams vendor lockin. It's stupid and I'd never use or recommend these things.
There are many open-source no-code tools so you can gain full control over your data/application with them as well as contribute into the source code.
For instance, you can deploy an admin panel with https://www.getmotoradmin.com/ (plug) and save a lot of time on building custom internal tools.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
#230Very old idea. First one I remember was COBOL--enables accountants to learn to use computers "without having to program", meaning without having to learn 1401 code.
Later, there was the 5th generation movement with Prolog or Prolog-type langauges.
Before that there was Fourth Generation Programming.
Building systems is hard and requires programming. So people look for a way around it, leading to the next generation of "no-code". Then, the systems reach some sort of inflection point where programming is again required to add functionality.
[Edit] See also "No Silver Bullet" for a thoughtful discussion about complexity of problems. This cycle will continue to repeat.