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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?

#341

Post by mb22 »

prepend wrote: post #71
mb22 wrote: post #12

I am an engineer with 20+ years of hands on keyboard, I've got projects that are now part of Apache, 1000's of stars on github. I've been CTO at a number of startups that have got significant funding. My point is to establish some credibility. I probably still suck. Having said that, I have been working with Microsoft PowerAutomate for the past 1.5 years and while it has saved a lot of time and been overall a good ex…

I’ve had a different experience with PowerAutomate. Both as a no-coder and a user. As a user the UX is horrible and I’m now swamped with terrible “apps” or “workflows” that people try to get me to use and fail for arcane reasons. Or are just ugly or brittle. As a no-coder the tools are hit or miss, the docs are bad, and widgets frequently don’t work due to my licensing and there’s no way to know other than to try and…

I find the UX horrible for different reasons, ones that I believe are pretty easy for microsoft to address if they just watched someone like me use the product. I have not experienced the brittleness, maybe what I am doing is more trivial.

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

#342

Post by ashtonkem »

Any attempt to drastically reduce the difficulty of programming has one of two effects: either it fails miserably, or it works brilliantly and immediately raises the bar of what is expected out of our software. "No code" should be understood in the same vein as COBOL was supposed to eliminate the need for highly trained programmers (per a sibling comment). Obviously COBOL didn't do that, so the question is whether this is a hype bubble or a new incremental step.

Personally, my money is on hype. All the demos I've seen are pretty impressive, but very shallow. Large apps are complicated beasts, and scaling usually ruins simplistic demos pretty quickly. Furthermore they seem to suffer from the same issue that prevented COBOL for making programmers obsolete: defining requirements correctly is very, very hard.

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

#343

Post by ashtonkem »

GordonS wrote: post #134
ethbr0 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I definitely think that's a large part of it, but I saw impressive uses of Excel and Access by non-coders long before it was typical to lock-down workstations the way corporations do nowadays (like, 20 years ago).

Excel is used because it's understood by business types, not because it's the only thing available. They're comfortable with spreadsheets, it's no surprise that they'll try to solve any given problem they have with spreadsheets.

You see the same thing in reverse, with programmers reaching for Python when Excel probably would've been a better choice. Everyone reaches for what's familiar.

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

#344

Post by xmprt »

jrm4 wrote: post #147
jl6 wrote: post #42

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…

It's a perfect analogy. Don't sell yourself short. Look, the following things are true. 1) This industry absolutely has the capability create more tools like Excel that are both extremely empowering and orders of magnitude easier than what we think of as coding. 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…

I'd argue there's a massive incentive to do this if you can because then every other company in the world can downsize their engineering staff and take advantage of the no code solution that you're selling. Even if you sell at an absurd price like $1M/year but it allows a company to replace 10 programmer, it'd probably be worth it.

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

#345

Post by archibaldJ »

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…

The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

- The Tao of Programming (1987)

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

#346

Post by truly »

I think it a good answer to the wrong question.

The wrong question is: (most/many) people cannot program because it is difficult to type the right things in, so let us remove typing.

The right question should be: how can we more efficiently develop software?

No-one would ever think to start a no-write movement because people cannot write properly. We instead teach everyone to write starting from the first grade, and we build tools to help them write better (dictionaries, word processors, spell checkers).

For programming, we should also concentrate on building tools (like the awesome IDEs of today) that makes developing software more efficient. Some of the efficiency can be had by no-code (i.e., Delphi-style forms), some can be had by improvements to technology (code completion), some can be had by improved language design. We should also invest more in programming education.

Low/no code DSLs are also good (think of Excel).

But I am skeptical of general purpose no-code: if it's Turing-complete, it's just a programming language in disguise.

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

#347

Post by wvenable »

jimbokun wrote: post #124
jl6 wrote: post #42

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…

I would go further and say Excel is the ultimate no-code solution. It has been used by more people to solve coding like problems by non-coders than any other no-coding tool.

I disagree that these are coding problems. Just math isn't coding. These might be real problems that are difficult to solve, and that problem solving happens on a computer, but that doesn't make it coding.

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

#348

Post by wvenable »

bpicolo wrote: post #267
niark wrote: post #244

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…

I've seen a JSON parser written in a drag'n'drop visual no-code flowchart-like application that was very impressive and, if printed, would have caused the death of many trees. Utterly unmaintainable and horrifically stupid given any full-code solution would have involved using a pre-written library.

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

#350

Post by divs1210 »

In case you don't know, early compilers were developed under the hype term "automatic programming".

COBOL was designed to be used by business people.

Whether it is connecting wires, punching cards, typing in an IDE, connecting code blocks, or making flowcharts - it is all programming.

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