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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?

#381
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COBOL is code - it's not nocode.

It was sold as "basically English, so programmers are obsolete since everyone can write their own software". Which is pretty much the same pipe dream as "no code".

"Programmers" referring to engineers working with machine code and hardware architecture. People writing in high level languages where not considered "real programmers" back in the day, just like people writing in Python or JavaScript were not considered "real programmers" more recently.

But who you decide to call "real programmers" is of course beside the point. What is interesting is the raising of the abstraction level which happens with higher-level tools.

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

#382
It's another case of "your profession will be automated and replaced", which has always historically proven to be both true and false.

The "professions" that get replaced typically aren't professions by the time they can be reliably automated, in that they are usually monotonous tasks that don't contribute to the advancement of any field.

Everything evolves, but the bulk of people creating new software are still coding it after decades, just the same as the bulk of musicians creating new music are still playing instruments after centuries and millennia.

Perhaps our coding tools will eventually become so advanced we can just think it and a piece of software will be created, but that's also boring and unchallenging and will likely have the equivalent creative value of singing into a voice-changing social media filter. We have this in the present day but people still write and perform songs that others perceive as valuable.

The goalposts of what constitutes "creating" reliably move just as much as people continue to need to get their hands dirty in order to craft actual innovation.

The "no-code movement" is perhaps more an example of a "no-movement" trying to masquerade as a movement.

I don't mean to deride it, some things can and should be automated, and this is valuable in itself as it shifts the goals of innovation along. But it's misleading to elevate such things higher than their pay-grade.

And sure, maybe sometime AI and deep-learning could anticipate and create everything we need - "the singularity", etc - but at such a point, that innovation itself has been automated, we'll all probably just happily hang out at the beach, as there'd be no more work left to be done anyway.

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

#383
post #107
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…

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…

Maintenance is a big issue when you are using a no-code system to create another system which someone else will use (e.g. to create a business application).

But if you are using a no-code system to create an artefact (e.g. to wrangle data into a new format) then that issue isn't so relevant.

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

#384
The hype around no-code is manufactured and financed by the VC-backed companies in that space. Webflow is probably the biggest culprit, no other company attempts to pretend that a modern Dreamweaver (with all kinds of CMS lock-in under the hood) is going to revolutionize web design.

Other types of no-code tools span the entire gamut of IT, sales and marketing workflows. You already mentioned Zapier which for me has been very useful for a niche use case. I was setting up a virtual conference that used one app for selling tickets and accepting payment, and a second Zoom-like app that would host the livestream. I needed a way to automatically send event registrants an email from the livestream app with their conference link. Zapier did this very easily.

Another type of no-code tool that's pretty common is something like Google Tag Manager. Instead of needing developers to set up custom tag snippets in page templates, you can just add one GTM tag, then use a web GUI to add in additional tags. No access required to the production site.

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

#385

I work at Stacker (YC S20) [0] -- we're actively building a part of this future and so I've done a lot of thinking about it. My view is that, indeed, the general no-code category represents a paradigm shift in the truest sense. That is, it is not going to replace anything we currently use software engineering for, except at the very edges. This is pretty obvious to anyone who understands software and the complexity i…

Nice. Looks similar to the Restya Core. By any chance, did you get any inspiration from the Restya Core?

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

#386
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 can say from our experience: we made more that 2000+ no code projects so far and it really required some customization, some coding and technical understanding from "no code developers". No code operates together WITH normal developers. At WeLoveNoCode ( https://welovenocode.com/ ) we have mix of no coders who knows design, no code tools but also can dive into code. So it's not like isolated function, no code is an…

"Also, why see no code as a "competitor" or something completely different?"

Only, solely, and singularly because overexcited no-code proponents are holding it up as such. Otherwise it's no problem.

I actually came up with the insight I posted above while I was typing it. There'll probably some future variant of this post that has it expressed more cleanly, instead of burying what should have been the lede.

I'd say that no-code advocates should be more careful about their messaging; I understand the desire to sell to management, but pissing off "normal" developers is eating your seed corn. There's also architectural ways that manifests in the product itself, where if you think "normal" code is an exception, you'll build it as an exception, and cut yourself off from later growth.

If everyone understood no-code as a follower (and honestly, generally a rather late one... the developer community as a whole needs to process things down to maximum degree before it's ready for the non-developer community), and everyone involved saw it that way, I think we'd end up with a productive harmony. If no-code developers insist on attacking developers (or attacking their job security, or attacking their credibility with their managers, or attacking their work ethic... no-code advertising has done a lot of these sorts of things), it's going to raise hostility and ultimately be self-defeating for the no-code startups.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

FrontPage from day one generated garbage that only IE could read, on purpose. The other day I found a notebook from my high school days in which I attached a "Best viewed in your own browser" sticker to mock the best viewed on IE (and also Netscape) buttons that were the rage back in the day (pre-2000).

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

#389
post #360
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…

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…

the speed of tech debt gain is improved.

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

#390
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.

As a software engineer, the business data my manager wants is basically in Jira and even if they provides a (supposedly) user-friendly UI, they also offers their powerful JQL. And at the end of the day, each times my manager wants something specific from Jira, he comes to me so that I can provide him with the right query. And he's supposed to have a technical background, so I guess it's even worse with non tech people.
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