371–380 of 404 posts
Then again for some applications it works great: website designers, simple chatbots etc.
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…
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…
COBOL never claimed to be "no code", but what it did claim was that it would significantly lower the level of training required to program. Which it absolutely did. Before compilers, you had to program in machine code which was extremely tedious and error prone and required a detailed understanding the microprocessor and computer architecture. COBOL may seem clunky compared to modern languages, but the productivity i…
Hypercard
Macromedia Director, which later evolved into Flash
VisualBasic, which had fantastic WYSIWYG tools for interfaces
A little later:
Dreamweaver
PageMill
All the early Web tools (there were hundreds)
It is difficult to now remember the cult that existed around Hypercard for awhile, and which lead to spin off products, like SuperCard.
There was a real mania at that time to make it easy for everyone to learn the basics of programming.
At some point after 2000, and especially after 2010, the idea seemed to fade, and the tech industry for awhile got caught up in going in a very different direction: big frameworks, increasingly complex, increasingly abstract, a development system that required more and more tools.
I would like to see some of the old "education for the masses" energy come back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
SQL is no/low-code compared to using a low-level database like BDB for a given level of power. And yet it's much simpler for most use cases. 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.
In reality there is so much no-code/low-code solutions already there in place. Whole Wordpress ecosystem with plugins - you basically can do webshop in couple clicks, if you are writing webshop from scratch then you are stupid.
Then there are pointy haired bosses who think they can substitute their developers with low code. That is also stupid because their company probably needs developers. Like if they are SaaS provider - they ARE low code for other businesses and replacing developers with some low code will make company to be simply reseller of someone else business.
If you are SaaS vendor - you are low code provider for other businesses and from what I see many managers don't understand it and think they can make money on someone else solution.
I have been a professional programmer for forty years. In the eighties, there was a no-code desktop relational database application called Helix. I continue to think that it belongs on the same shelf as Excel in the UI hall of fame. Like Excel, people made applications with it. Unlike Excel, it created a server product in the mid-eighties that allowed it to become an IT platform. Small business owners who had hacked…