Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement? • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #308

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to fix a SharePoint workflow that indefinitely kicked off several workflows, and each workflow kicked off other workflows all being stuck in loops. A single workflow could have thousands of workflows kicking off... Guess who they let make something that simple? Some generic business analyst who left and nobody else knew how to support it. That second last word there is why developers will never go away.

Sure, but there's some kind of survivorship bias there. For every "app" like that, which grows up and needs support, there are dozens of others that serve out their usefulness and go away, or just live on in obscurity in some person's personal workflow. And generic business analysts are hardly the only ones who write bad code...

That's because business analysts don't get to touch code because they don't know what they're doing. You give every generic Business Degree holder access to visual studio and make custom apps and suddenly 5-10 years down the road companies will be relying on a sole piece of terribly optimized, unsafe, and security prone software that hackers globally will have a wet dream over.

This isn't just an "Oh developers trying to retain their jobs" rhetoric. This is a "keep power tools away from children" concept. Not saying Comp Sci degrees are terribly hard to acquire, just that there is a reason those people went in and got a Business degree and not a hard science degree. It's typically because they wanted the easy way out.

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

#392

Post by Tozen » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

vadfa wrote: post #58

mikewarot wrote: post #57

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

I'm not sure where the "confusion" about your options is coming from because Delphi (Object Pascal) still exists. You can get the Free Community Edition from here- https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

If a person knows Delphi/Pascal, there is no need for them to use Visual Basic 6, unless that was their feeling about such. There are several Object Pascal options to choose from, where if a person was previously exposed to Pascal/Turbo Pascal/Delphi, they would be able to get back up to speed very quickly.

As you mentioned Gambas, maybe you are thinking completely free and open-source, which Object Pascal has such too. The most obvious choice would be Free Pascal with the Lazarus IDE. For those that don't know or are confused, Delphi is a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language (check Wikipedia or Embarcadero website to verify). So the closest dialect of Object Pascal to what is used in Delphi (the IDE), would be Free Pascal/Lazarus. You can even import and convert Delphi projects (including Turbo Pascal) to Free Pascal/Lazarus. You can get Free Pascal/Lazarus from below:

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=downloads

https://github.com/LongDirtyAnimAlf/fpcupdeluxe (this is a special cross-platform installer)

There are also other dialects of Object Pascal that are free and open-source, such as PascalABC, which is a variation for .NET. You can check it out here- https://github.com/pascalabcnet/pascalabcnet

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

#393

Post by Alan_Dillman » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

I mean, once upon a time, UI design and digital composing were "coded". Slowly things get hoisted out of deeply technical domains, or at least, such that someone talented at other things can apply their type of technical knowledge. An artist generally makes a better UI designer than a programmer.

What I don't like is the trend of teaching people to almost reach their goals, without also teaching them how to fill in the details that the "Do What I Say" tool cannot.

What would be a more laudable and practical goal would be something that eases people into more advanced programming, or points them down different paths that are associated. It is useful to know "No, I don't want to do this, but

So in the end, I think the "No code" movement is just the latest iteration of sky high dreams. It looks like training wheels, but it is anything but.

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

#394

Post by mdpye » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #183

mdpye wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you are talking at cross purposes. You are suggesting no-code first on a micro timescale. For prototyping. That seems like a solid suggestion and use of resources. But from the GP, I read a statement on the macro scale. No-code can't codify turn-key pluggable building blocks until the problem spaces of those blocks have been thoroughly explored by code solutions, and a small number of "winning" configuratio…

We have a different definition of no-code, I think. I wasn't including any tools that don't offer generic enough primitives to build an arbitrary business process. If we're reducing no-code to "things that have been written in code first, that can then be plugged together by the no-code user", then we're talking about libraries with a visual designer on top.

Sure, your no code system can be Turing complete. Lots of things are accidentally Turing complete. But at that point, aren't you just coding with a different interface but all the same problems and complexity? And (as argued already elsewhere in the thread) none of the tools and support...

I agree that "arbitrary business process" is a smaller target. But it's one that grows over time (see GP comment) to include more and more "solved problems" that were solved by lots and lots of code.

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

#395

Post by sporkland » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

I echo a lot of comments here that low-code/no-code isn't a recent movement. I think the one exciting trend that I've noticed among the historical instances of this like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access, SharePoint Sites, etc is that they are very exciting to business users and hence gain massive adoption, which eventually turns into universal revulsion by IT at having to maintain these massive numbers of specialized apps and makes for a very difficult transition.

Seems potentially lucrative if you can build a successful business around one.

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

#396

Post by mark-r » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 4:03 AM UTC

The most miserable software experience I've had was trying to support a Microsoft BI system built with a no-code tool. It was all drag-and-drop and fill in the boxes. Instead of code you were left with an inscrutable XML file. It was nearly impossible to trace the flow from input to output, and even worse if you were trying to go backwards from output to input. Good luck to you if someone had a question about how a value in the database was derived.

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

#397

Post by javierluraschi » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

Shameless plug to https://hal9.com -- We believe there is a place for no-code, as long as you are not prevented from exporting or changing the components with code. We enable data analysis with parametrizable blocks which are 100% backed by open-source code, we believe you get the best of both worlds with hybrid solutions like this one.

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

#398

Post by kirso » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

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…

This!

The funny thing about no code is that after delving into it for 6 months as a non-technical person and realising its limitations it pushed me to start my code learning journey again.

It has its purpose for prototyping and some early validation but...

It gets expensive... it gets fragmented and you are closed down to one ecosystem (hello Bubble).

I hacked things together with airtable, Webflow and Zapier. It aggregated to hundreds of dollars per month in costs. I also found myself constantly trying to find some workarounds and in fact there are additional app extensions to Webflow that allow to create even basic functionality like search or multi-filters.

Long story short it has its place for specific purposes but even then I would still rather learn how to spin-off netlify or vercel and put a boiler plate with mailchimp online to test my hypothesis rather than mapping data strings in Zapier for as simple as form collection fields.

I though must thank no code for getting me back into code! I am still a newbie but I am enjoying every moment of my javascript journey (is it a masochistic thing to say considering all the frustration with bugs?)

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

#399

Post by cafard » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 12:57 PM UTC

I have been interested to see what one can do in Smartsheets. However, I have also ended up debugging the workflows set up by a co-worker--not particularly technical. I guess that I would say that the Smartsheets workflows reduce the need for coding, but not for considering possible states and transitions.

And the creators of Smartsheets seem to have heard and run with somebody's maxim that "It doesn't matter what users say they want, they want Excel."

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

#400

Post by mike22 » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 12:32 AM UTC

hackerbrother wrote: post #73

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).

JHipster (https://www.jhipster.tech/) goes a bit beyond that. From my reading, its basic functionality is taking in either interactive command line inputs or theor custom DSL, and spitting out DDL for a MySQL DB, Spring Boot backend, and Angular frontend.