291–300 of 404 posts
Imagine if this were the case in other field. A "no words" movement for people that want to publish a book but don't want to bother with the writing part.
I've seen massive sites with hundreds of thousands of crappy ai articles getting a LOT of traffic.
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
Quoting:
Highlights
- Open Source
- Written in Pascal for Pascal
- Cross-platform
- Over 200 Components
- Extendable through packages
- Package Manager with Online Repositry
- Many Frameworks
- Converts from Delphi code
- Regular Releases
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…
Excel is the archetypal success-story, perhaps. It is ill-suited as a general purpose programming language, but as a language for arithmetic operations on data it... excels.
The same is true of Airtable and Zapier. They introduce new, simple abstractions for data, and for automation.
Disclosure: I'm the founder of a no-code startup in the browser automation space. I rationalise what we do as 'introducing high-level abstractions in a visual DSL'. You won't see that description in investor pitches. No-code products are just high-level programming languages.
If you pick the correct abstractions, working this way is actually faster than coding for the bulk of use-cases, whilst making edge-cases hard to deal with. For those, coding is inevitable.
Old RAD tools like VisualBasic is far superior than no-code. GUI is better than CLI if done right.
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…
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…
By the same token, C is low-code compared to assembler, Python is low-code compared to C, and Steel Bank Common Lisp is low-code compared to Python.
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
VB .NET, which is just Visual Basic now, is like that and is "modern".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been consulting in no-code platforms, in addition to writing actual code, for about 8 years. Producing something that works isn't the problem. Maintaining it is. The legacy codebases from this stuff are dumpster fires, because most of the tools are closed enough ecosystems that the companies supporting them have to reinvent every programming best practice from the last 30 years. 'Version control? Sure, that's a…
Maintainability is always the issue, even for the things made from code. What do you think will happen if the no-code platforms become open source?
We have solutions from the 90s that, thank the heavens, I don’t have to work on them. If I did I would probably quit. But the business has to keep the thing chugging along, and it’s _very hard_ to get out of.
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…
Using a tool that avoids code always means either compromise or you are really coding but in an inefficient ui (eg building a budget app in excel)
This 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…
> Excel allows non-coders to do many useful things I heard a great quip at some point: "Why is Excel the most useful IDE?" Answer: "Because it's the one IDE every business allows every user to access." Most of us here have forgotten that many businesses flat out ban access to programming tools for the majority of users. And what is an enterprising user to do, when they realize they're performing the same process 100…