Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 404 posts

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

#81

Post by jamil7 »

donatj wrote: post #61

While I certainly saw them coming a mile away, the rise of sites like Squarespace and Wix still unnerves me a little bit. While I do primarily backend data work these days, I spent a lot of the early 2000's working for an agency that built websites for people and companies. Many of which would have been simple enough to throw together in Squarespace. I'd always thought I could fall back into building websites if this…

I see it as kind of comforting. These tools take care of the cookie-cutter projects so developers can work on more interesting things.

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

#82

Post by junon »

This is such an old concept that it's been beaten into the ground at this point. These "movements" aren't really movements, they're product bandwagons. Notice how most of these "no-code" solutions are proprietary, for-profit, non-standard and unwilling to be anything but.

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

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

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).

> 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).

Supabase is pretty much the backend piece of this (built around PostgREST), all it needs is a frontend generator that fits with its DB conventions.

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

#85

Post by mikewarot »

redisman wrote: post #65
vadfa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

The problem is that you can’t usually afford to target just a Windows 95 PC or equivalent today so such a tool cannot exist. The UI must morph and adapt and feel native across phones, tablets, retina displays, etc. Even video games these days need to adapt to a different UX on each platform even thou they are the closest to having one unified UI across the gamut

It's unrealistic to expect a full, productive, desktop experience on any smaller devices.

Giving up on the desktop is a huge step backwards.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

goohle wrote: post #66
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #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 m…

Formulas are the code, otherwise FORTRAN is another popular no-code product.

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

goohle wrote: post #66
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #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 m…

Formulas are the code, otherwise FORTRAN is another popular no-code product.

By that logic, typing a URL into a browser or an email address into the "To:" field is code.

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

#88

Post by bitwize »

redisman wrote: post #65
vadfa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

The problem is that you can’t usually afford to target just a Windows 95 PC or equivalent today so such a tool cannot exist. The UI must morph and adapt and feel native across phones, tablets, retina displays, etc. Even video games these days need to adapt to a different UX on each platform even thou they are the closest to having one unified UI across the gamut

I like typing stuff in and instantly seeing the results, rather than rat wrestling widgets onto a form. Rat wrestling also makes adaptive UIs difficult; again, the solution is being able to declare your UI with layout managers that apply constraints.

The most rapid UI tool I've ever encountered is Tcl/Tk. Everything else involves incurring more tedium and misery -- even Visual Basic or Delphi.

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

#89

Post by aarondia »

A lot of comments here point to users eventually running up against the boundaries of no/low-code environments and having to make the decision to graduate from them or push their limits to a place where they were really not intended to be used.

I've spent the past 1.5 years or so building a no-code data analytics tool called Mito [1] -- a spreadsheet extension to JupyterLab that lets previously Excel-based workers make the switch to a Python based environment. Unlike other no/low-code data analytics tools we spend a large amount of engineering time making sure that users are never locked into Mito. We do this in 2 ways: Firstly, every time you make an edit to your data in the Mito spreadsheet, we automatically generate the equivalent Python code for you. And secondly, to make it easy to work with that code, Mito is an extension to your JupyterLab environment. By existing in the IDE that you would otherwise be using if you didn't have the low-code environment, its really easy for users to switch back and forth between working in the Mito no-code environment and writing code themselves.

Practically, what we've seen over the past year is that giving users ownership of the code that they create using Mito and existing in JupyterLab has been incredibly important. The most active Mito users are those that use Mito in conjunction with custom Python code that they or their company has written. They do things like incorporate API calls to access their data, use advanced pandas/Python functionality that we don't support, etc.

TLDR: We believe that no/low-code are most powerful when they are augments to the "real deal" code-first workflow instead of a substitution.

[1] https://trymito.io/hn

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

#90

Post by davnicwil »

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 inherent in building custom things. Rather, it will enable a massive new category of software to be built, where presently it is uneconomical to do so.

Think simple tools, sometimes throwaway tools only needed for a few weeks, tools specific to each new project - things currently implemented with whiteboards and sticky notes that would clearly be better as digital tools in all sorts of ways - and indeed increasingly essential as the assumption that everyone is in the same office gets less true.

This stuff is typically quite straightforward but requires deep domain context that'd be really difficult to translate into a spec, and way too expensive anyway to justify hiring engineers to build, but it can now just be done directly by the domain experts themselves who need not necessarily be technical.

This category is simply massive - think of the number of such tools that could be useful in even a single given business if they were simple and cheap to create. Now multiply that by every business.

If you're convinced / intrigued by any of what I've said, by the way, we are hiring. So let's chat about it more! Email is in my profile :-)

[0] https://stackerhq.com

Post reply on HN