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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?

#231

Post by marmaduke »

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…

This seems true until one can generate code based on descriptions like GH Copilot can do. That’s a step towards structurally capable.

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

#232

Post by cabalamat »

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…

> It just goes wrong when no-code advocates put the cart in front of the horse and make grandiose claims about replacing all developers or something

"no code" like most IT industry buzzwords over the last 70 years, is mostly bullshit but with a kernel of useful truth.

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

#233

Post by hluska »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #204
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…

I remember articles early on during the release of SQL that promoted it as a way to reduce the need for programmers because it would allow managers to access all the data they wanted through natural language. Things didn't really turn out that way.

I took a course in COBOL when I was in Unversity. The professor was in industry but taught one night class a semester.

He started the class by talking about how when he learned COBOL, they told him this would make developers obsolete because it would let managers build their own solution. In his experience, it made developers even more valuable because “give a manager five minutes with a codebase, give a developer a job for five years cleaning the mess up.”

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

#234

Post by xaduha »

Laugh all you want, but I genuinely believed that XML standards, yes those 'design by committee' standards like XForms, XProc, XPath/XQuery 3.0+ and just general web standards like XHTML 2.0 could've been the future and a backbone of something that a lot of people could use and not just as customers.

Not by writing XML by hand without proper tools, but using something built upon this, on an extensible, inter-operated web. Think using modern XMPP for messaging, instead of a zoo of messaging apps that can't talk to each other or Yahoo Pipes on steroids. But that's not the universe we live in and that's not the no-code we're talking about.

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

#235

Post by colechristensen »

It’s not new but an old idea which is a bit of a fad. People will try to take it too far and then realize it’s not good for everything but the idea rightfully should get some increased mindshare.

Code, especially these days, can get quite insanely complicated and pretty far from being a concise description of appearance and behavior. Fiddling with frameworks and libraries and language features instead of doing the thing you’re actually trying to do has gotten to be too much and no-code fad is the response.

It should also be an implicit call for “hey lets try to reduce complexity” but that is rarely listened for.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

ecshafer wrote: post #15

What is old is new again. This has happened before. Graphical programming, low-code, no-code. They all inevitably hit a wall where it does not cut it. Either the performance is not good enough, they need to dip into real code to add features, etc. Then there are the issues like CICD and version control that they don't do well that hold them back, and then integrating with the rest of the company. Its just not worth i…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by MarkLowenstein »

Aperocky wrote: post #188

It's in the same class of ideas as perpetual motion machines. In that case, it violates laws of thermodynamics, in the "no code" case, it violates Information Theory. The entire process of coding is about translating requirements into machine executable programs. The requirements cannot be condensed below a certain threshold and that's where the 'no code' promise fails. You can move around blocks of shapes but in the…

Yes. People can make wonderful things on computers. Online satellite maps, GPT3 text generators, simulated 3-D universes.

But never a successful no-code system.

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

#238

Post by 015a »

In my experience, these tools are sometimes a fantastic option for developers to alleviate some of the burden of managing infrastructure and code. But I've rarely seen a powerful solution which can be used by non-developers; either because the tool is powerful, but complex, and thus the same skillset it takes to be a developer ends up being necessary to interface with the tool, or because the tool is integrating with systems/APIs developers wrote, and it takes a developer to understand how to handle that interface.

But I think they're really cool none-the-less, as a developer. I can build a modern react web application with the best of them, but I still pay for a squarespace personal site. At work, we use a ton of zapier and retool; when the problem space fits, its just less dev work. But the devs are the ones who do maintain it, at the end of the day.

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

#239

Post by bjt »

What's fascinating to me as that it's happening at the same time as the "X as code" movement.

Devops: Infrastructure as code. or dbt's viewpoint on analytics as code (see https://blog.getdbt.com/building-a-mature-analytics-workflow...)

So I'm seeing it as an exercise in finding sweet spots. There are things that have been mostly manual or point-and-click and people are seeing wins from defining and managing them as code. Usually in terms of reproducibility and testability. Then there are things that people have traditionally done in code (e.g. admin UIs) where maybe most of it can be abstracted away into a point and click tool.

No-code works great until it breaks, and then your ability to debug is going to be very constrained. We're fighting that problem with some no-code ETLs using Stitch at work today, for example.

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

#240

Post by StevePerkins »

can16358p wrote: post #218
darkwater wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pfft. Dreamweaver (and even FrontPage) were perfectly fine back in the pre-IE6 days when they dominated.

People today crap on using 's for grid formatting, just as we crap on 1990's Java code for its `AbstractStrategyFactoryFactory` excesses. Because it's "what people did back in the bad old days", and is a glaring red flag that one's skills are out of date.

But whereas OO design patterns are a matter of subjective debate, early HTML4 and prior just flat out didn't have modern mechanism for separating presentation and content. CSS 1.x was very limited, and no major web browser even seriously supported that until the year 2000. CSS 2.x didn't get real until the 2010's.

Would any professional use Dreamweaver today? Of course not. But it was an appropriate tool for its time.

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