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It's not a "movement" it's a boring marketing campaign about some tools that are nothing new.
Let's call these tools "shit code generators" instead and try market that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of us here have forgotten that many businesses flat out ban access to programming tools for the majority of users. That sounds... counter productive to say the least.
Good luck even getting access to cmd.exe at a lot of places. We have a phrase where I work: “Security: we put the ‘no’ in ‘innovation’!”
I can't imagine why we continue to have security breaches in major companies...
But I think that almost every marketing claim from a No-Code company or those dudes selling $500 No-Code courses is false.
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 :)
You mean Sharepoint. oh wait, it sucks! ...
You mean Dreamweaver. Oh wait, it produces crappy code ...
Visual FoxPro...
VBA apps...
Java's Vignette...
Who the hell are people kidding here? I encourage all the "no-code" people here to try all these solutions and understand why they eventually failed, because yours will suffer from the exact same problems...
We hire engineers (usually ML, computer visions, etc.) and embed them with clients.
They meet 1-1 with their team members to walk through what they actually do in their daily work.
The eng. can then build light-weight solutions in real-time to optimize & automate those workflows.
It’s like prototyping as a service.
There’s certainly a huge movement around “citizen developers,” but what we’ve seen is these makers get stuck quickly when their solutions need to scale, be used by someone else, or integrate with other workflows.
Computational thinking is the key.
Initially we thought, like everyone else, we’d hire no coders and teach them to think like engineers.
It became obvious quickly that is was more about finding product-minded engineers who enjoy building things that help people and then show them how fast they could do that with these tools.
It’s made us incredibly opinionated about no code tools. Most are too limited for this approach.
It's okay, but by its very nature, it's not as flexible as code. Often I see an argument describing low-code tools as "Pareto efficient", but even that turns out to be a false economy once your use case becomes a little more complex. Generally speaking, if you're doing something beyond building a simple form or table, and have some serious business logic to implement, in my experience, code is the only way to go. Any…
In my experience, these tools have another - counter intuitive and often overlooked - strength. Their limitations. You want to handle this very specific edge case? With code, there is certainly a way to do this. It may take days, it may add unreasonable complexity. Nevertheless, someone (yourself?) will ask that this kinda insignificant edge case is properly handled. And won’t take no for an answer. With a (too) limi…
You may underestimate the ingenuity of non-developers hacking on no-code platforms. They end up thinking a lot more like developers than one might think. Our operations organization has independently arrived at some things pretty darn adjacent to more advanced software patterns, like circuit breakers. (This being for workflow automation no-code tooling, vs website builders). And a ton of real world work is getting do…
Also, website generators have always existed since the web is the web.
The main problem with website generators is vendor lock-in. If the vendor goes away so does your website. If the vendor unilaterally changes their price structure, you have no leverage. If the vendor comes with any new arbitrary terms of service, you have no leverage either.
If the vendor decides to block your website due to some false positive from an automated system, you may have no recourse and your entire web presence is gone while the problem is resolved, if it ever gets resolved. Meanwhile you have no way to deploy your stuff anywhere else.
Eventhough we had these tools I still preferred to code from scratch, simply I could not stand the output code, it was messy, full of unused stuff, excesively commented, etc.
I like to look under the hood and understand what's going on. This is not for me.