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The “No Code” Delusion

alexhudson.com

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Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#151

Post by keawade »

neilwilson wrote: post #15

Fred Brooks - No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, Vol. 20, No. 4 (April 1987) pp. 10-19. https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html Read and inwardly digest

Yes!

I think this line in particular is a good TL;DR of the issues discussed in the linked article:

> The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#152

Post by sgift »

chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#153

Post by matthewowen »

worldsayshi wrote: post #20
emilecantin wrote: post #13

I read somewhere a quote that stuck with me: "No tool is ever going to free us from the burden of clarifying our ideas." And that's how I view my job as a software developer: clarifying ideas. Any "No Code" tool is still going to either force you to clarify your ideas, or have a large amount of assumptions. "Idea People" and "Business" don't like that, so they'll probably end up delegating the use of "No Code" tools…

There are plenty of tools that help us in clarifying our ideas though. Take mathematical notation for example. Or music notation. Or a CAD program. All are examples of domain specific tools that allow the user to specify their intention in a non-ambiguous way. And they also allow the user to think about and experiment with the problem space. I think what we need is something akin to this. The "business logic" that we…

some sort of "common business-oriented language"?

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#154

Post by BigJono »

chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

I mean, if you spent 20 years implementing nothing but static web pages and learning nothing then that prophecy would have come true by now, no? I don't see any jobs for just HTML and CSS anymore.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#155

Post by markmiro »

I like to think of the no-code stuff like this:

- People who are into this stuff know there's something to it, but as a movement, we don't know exactly what it is.

- My personal feeling is that any no-code tool should be useful enough that I would use it. I want some no-code to make me feel for my career a bit.

- The "threat", I think, is very real. For example, whenever I see myself following a set of rules to write software and not thinking, I start to wonder if some abstraction is lurking in there. Maybe the solution is a programming library, but increasingly, I think there's opportunity for this stuff to be more visual.

Why visual?

- UI programming is necessarily visual, and a visual tool for building interfaces makes sense

- Tools around managing software development. GitHub is IMO a no-code tool. VSCode is. Many IDEs are.

Why not visual? Algorithms and business logic. Like the author, I'm unconvinced that flow diagrams will provide enough flexibility to be useful for all but the simplest cases.

I guess my feelings aren't that different from the author's but I think the difference is I'm optimistic that the movement will be generative.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#156

Post by cr0sh »

detaro wrote: post #55
swalsh wrote: post #26

I've spent a long time trying to build "No Code" solutions. Probably 3 different products, 3 different companies. But once, I tried something different. I pushed back, instead I proposed we build a domain specific language using Ruby. I already had some trust with my boss... and he was pretty convinced it was going to fail, he had zero faith these smart (but non-technical) users could successfully use it. But he was…

Did you do anything special presentation/interface-wise? My impression is that a good part of it for many is not making them realize that they are "programming" until they've already accepted that they can do it, because otherwise they "know" that it is too difficult.

> because otherwise they "know" that it is too difficult.

This is something that frustrates me in general, and I'm sure others, too:

That there seems to be among a certain population of people a mindset that declares failure before they've even tried. Or, they try, but at the first hint of failure or trouble, they declare that they can't do it, and stop.

So what is different about those people who don't do this? Why do they instead take up new challenges, and when they fail, try again. When they run up against difficulty, they step back, think about their options, perhaps consult experts in the domain, and continue on?

And how do we get the former group to join the latter?

I know there isn't an easy answer to this, if there is one at all; I know I'm not the first to observe this issue either - it's likely something that has been observed and wondered upon for thousands of years.

...but nonetheless, it continues to be frustrating.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#157

Post by sgslo »

UserIsUnused wrote: post #19
q3k wrote: post #9

This delusion is especially visible in the DevOps space. For some reason we have decided as an industry that instead of writing some code in whatever 'real' language we will base operational work on YAML with ad-hoc templating and stringly-typed programming constructs. The main culprits are Ansible/Salt and all the string-templating based tools for Kubernetes (Helm/Kustomize/...). Especially with tools like Helm I be…

Thank god trends like Pulumi and the new AWS sdk is emerging. General purpose programing languages are getting more expressive by the day, why do we use data serialization languages instead for configs? it doesn't make any sense. Configuration is code not data.

> new AWS SDK

Could you share some details on that? A quick Google search didn't reveal anything about major changes to the SDK.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#158

Post by BigJono »

lucasverra wrote: post #139
yebyen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm compelled to invoke the "Ninety-Ninety" rule when I hear about solutions like that, although I'm sure it works sometimes, in my experience it usually turns out more like this. The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time!

Isn't the majority of software following this rule ? This is not specific of low/no code environment

Yes it is, but if you're doing the first 90% properly you have a much better shot at mitigating the difficulty of the last 10%.

I think there's some vague point in any project where it goes from being 'easy' to 'hard' to add new stuff. Basically the only factor that matters for productivity is how long you can delay that point. If you just do the first 90% as quickly and cheaply as possible, you're just resigning yourself to hitting that point as early as possible.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#159

Post by yhoiseth »

brazzy wrote: post #39
osullivj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly 40 years for me; I remember reading about The Last One [1] back in 81. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

The pipe dream is far older than that. Around 1960 some people seriously claimed that within about 5 years there would be no more professional programmers because with this new language, everyone could write the software they need themselves, since it was so easy to use. The language was COBOL. Oh, and look, this one still seems to be around: http://www.makeyourownsoftware.com/

Thanks for sharing—that site is a real gem!

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#160

Post by jhjjhj »

emilecantin wrote: post #13

I read somewhere a quote that stuck with me: "No tool is ever going to free us from the burden of clarifying our ideas." And that's how I view my job as a software developer: clarifying ideas. Any "No Code" tool is still going to either force you to clarify your ideas, or have a large amount of assumptions. "Idea People" and "Business" don't like that, so they'll probably end up delegating the use of "No Code" tools…

could it have been https://www.xkcd.com/568/
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