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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?

#51
I'm in the process of doing a technical audit of several of these for a government. My favourite so far is the ServiceNow platform.

These platforms are great at making use of bottom tier devs quite effectively. They're a resource amplifier, when you don't have the cash to hire better devs. Hire a few devs to create the custom controls, actions, etc.. and have a boat load of juniors implement the requirements. Most of these folk haven't picked up a new language since college, and don't incorporate coding into their lives. These individuals have value, but often create more problems due to their lack of skill and/or experience. In a low/no code environment, you can better ensure that they're on rails.

The issues we're encountering is the pricing model, and it's most likely we'll end up going with Microsoft's because of the existing contracts. ServiceNow for all it's strengths really shoots itself in the foot with pricing. A product like this benefits from any "power" user being able to implement their own internal workflows, but ServiceNow charges per dev. So they're handicapping themselves. But someone will figure out all the pieces, it's inevitable.

As a means to solve boring, repetitive, uninspired development, it's great, and it'll be the future in the way that SquareSpace and Wix ate into front end presence sites...

And honestly, if you aren't a great developer, I suspect the rails would make you feel a lot better.

This won't take any jobs from anyone likely reading this. HN frequently has a blind spot for that vast majority of enterprise development. It's not sexy, but it makes up more developers than the Silicon Valley crowd by magnitudes. And most of them would fail a Fizz Buzz. With no code, I can make use of those resources.

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

#52

Seems okay to me, it's just one more layer of abstraction higher up the chain. The organizational problem is controlling ad hoc app proliferation by non development units and thereby creating unsupported shadow systems. So, when used by dev teams I see no problem, but usage by operational units should be highly policed.

Seems okay to me, it's just one more layer of abstraction higher up the chain.

Exactly.

C++ is no-code if you work in x86 assembler.

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

#53
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 suppose the difficult part is figuring when you've crossed the fine line from "good enough for now" to "this is becoming a monstrosity, we need to hire developers and create our own software now"

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

#56
The most popular programming environment on the planet is Microsoft Excel, a no-code product.

I think a lot of developers are very anti-no-code because they know, as any rational person does, that any no-code solution flexible enough to do everything will look pretty much just like programming. But no-code shouldn't be a 'do everything' solution, it should be a 'do a lot of things more easily' solution. No-code, to me, means tools designed to bridge the gap between non-programmers and programmers and allow individuals to access computing at levels that are comfortable for them while on-ramping them towards more and more programming as their needs increase. This is what personal computing is all about.

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

#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 things that just weren't necessary in Pascal.

Since then everything is expected to work across the internet, through a web browser, web server, etc. It'll never be as simple and effective as it was.

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

#58

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

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

#60
post #33
post #14

Platforms like Alteryx ( https://www.alteryx.com/ ) used for large data cleaning strike me as a strange stop gap between a clunky system like Excel (which has its natural 1 million row limit) and Python/R/SQL that are full OOP and are likely considered too hard to learn for many business professionals. And yet watching people using the platform looks tortuous! Why not invest in an often free application that you can…

I'm a decent programmer and I use an expensive, no-code application called FME for data cleaning/analysis/exploration/transformation etc. almost all the time. While I'm certainly capable doing basically everything I do in FME using Python, I am far more productive using FME. With FME I can knock together something in 10-15 minutes that would take me hours to do in Python. That being said, one feature of FME that I do…

The combination of visual programming with the ability to add code when required can be very fast and powerful (it is the approach we are using with our data cleaning tool, Easy Data Transform).
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