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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?

#71
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 see.

It has such promise as the shell scripting equivalent for the cloud what shell was to PCs. But instead it is a costly and difficult thing to use.

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

#72
I was wondering if there was any similar conversation going on way way back when compilers were a new thing - found this gem by Grace Hopper (1958) (yeah THAT Grace Hopper).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ie50587a038

She's talking about the difference between "programmer" (one who designs logic and processes) from "coder" (one who converts those processes to "codes" - i.e. assembly) and how compilers have the potential to eliminate the need for "coders"

I'm tickled by the (IMO) obvious parallels that have just moved up a few levels in complexity us who use text editors to write programs are often supporting configurable logic for someone downstream who can get work done with less complexity using simpler, more accessible tools.

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

#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).

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

#75

It's weird from the perspective of game development because it's so obvious. A lot of time is spent on development tools because making a modern game is a very complex undertaking that is highly data-driven. A large amount of game tools are #nocode not because it's a movement but because it's useful. A classic example is level design tools that are much more about spatial design with some coupling between entities in…

I feel like there is a distinction between tools and no code and these are just tools. You can maybe prototype a game mechanic if it’s not very unique with drag and drop but it’ll never scale to production. By the end the game code will have thousands of special cases which would make the nice no code experience a complete Frankenstein monster

> I feel like there is a distinction between tools and no code and these are just tools.

Programming is just a tool as well... there's a odd distinction here that somehow more specific tools are lesser. I also think this is where the whole #nocode thing can go wrong. You should empower non-programmers in ways that suit them.

> You can maybe prototype a game mechanic if it’s not very unique with drag and drop but it’ll never scale to production.

The expressiveness of composition is only limited by the number of elements you have to compose. In the specific zombie case no it wouldn't scale to production. But then the prototype wasn’t meant to and also would never have existed if it weren't for these tools. We unlocked the ability for our Art Director to prototype a new game all by themselves. That's massive from a creativity point of view. We'll almost certainly turn it into a full game at some point.

From a production standpoint a game is thousands of special data cases. Which is why tools are so important and code is both data and a tool but if you can simplify things so much the better.

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

#77
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…

Excel is a great example of how “low code” or “no code” are recent buzzwords for a long continuing evolution. There have long been attempts to make software development more accessible. Some attempts stuck (Crystal Reports 1984, Excel 1987, WordPress 2003, IFTTT 2010) while others did not (HyperCard 1987, FrontPage 1995). The same will be true for the current crop of platforms.

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

#78
I think there’s “good” no code and “bad.”

Bad is where there’s only no code and it’s impossible to drill down. Or use outside of a walled garden.

Good is when the end product is portable and can be worked on outside the tool.

I think the problem comes when noncoders hit a wall and can’t go any further.

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

#79

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).

Lots of startups attempting this, two big ones being Retool and Airtable doing almost exactly what you describe.

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

#80
Standard rants:

1) Every symbolic or visual representation of a command or control flow structure in a no-code tool is isomorphic to some construct in a programming language, just more cumbersome to author and manage, especially at scale. Therefore, users of no-code tools are programmers; they engage in programming when using the tool to define some process.

2) Programming with text can be done with a variety of tools, from full-fledged IDEs to Notepad. Programming with a graphical representation can be done only with tools that render that representation (usually, proprietary tools from the no-code tool vendor).

3) Text is more amenable to being diffed, transformed, and version-controlled than are visual representations.

4) Visual representations have a low complexity threshold beyond which they simply become unmanageable. It doesn't take long to clutter the screen and make it difficult to find what you are looking for and manipulate it. Some sort of normalizing or beautifying feature for the program control graph, as well as a search feature, may be added, but these are necessarily more complicated than their text-based equivalents.

5) It's much easier to simply type in what you want the computer to do than to engage in prolonged rat wrestling to construct a representation of the procedure to be followed.

6) No-code is circumscribed: If you are writing something the no-code tool author anticipated, you will be fine, If you are writing something the no-code tool author didn't anticipate, good frigging luck.

7) We've been sold this snake oil time and time again. It was CASE tools in the 90s. In the 2000s, we were literally told that programmers would be made obsolete by the emergence of UML to program conversion tools. (I had a professor who said as much, almost in so many words.) It never takes because with the complexity of real-world software, it becomes an ergonomic nightmare.

8) No-code is intended for two main audiences: as didactic tools for children or the barest of beginners, and as production tools for dilettantes who want to program without putting in the effort or assuming the stigma that professional programmers do. In a production environment, the output of these dilettantes will be abandoned by the dilettantes themselves, who aspire to grander things like marketing, management, or finance; and will instead have to be maintained by... professional software developers, who will curse the original authors' names forever -- thus nullifying one of the touted advantages of no-code to organizations: that you get the benefits of custom programming without having to hire programmers.

In short, in order to think of things more snake-oil than no-code, I have to go to the old standbys of medical pseudoscience and multi-level marketing products. I can see no-code used as a crutch by those who are new to programming and afraid to approach it, but they would perhaps be better served by using something that involves code, but tricks them into believing that what they're doing is not programming, thus alleviating their "programming anxiety". Secretaries were successfully trained to write rather elaborate Emacs Lisp on Multics Emacs back in the 1970s -- simply because they were told that in so doing they were simply customizing their editor, not programming it!

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