The “No Code” Delusion

You _always_ need code. Some customers don't need much, but they all need _some_.

The first example that comes to mind is duplicate detection. Sure, the basics are simple. No two agreements of the same kind for the same customer. A lot of no-code solutions struggle at this point.

But then you get to the slightly more complex requirements. You _can_ have two agreements of the same kind for the same customer, as long as they are not overlapping in time. But if customer B is a subsidiary of A, and A already has the agreement, then B cannot have its own, if A's agreement is marked "company-wide". This also goes for C, which is a subsidiary of B.

I've yet to see a no-code solution that makes this sort of thing accessible to non-programmers. And programmers will prefer just writing the code.

Learning a skill takes time and tenacity. Years ago, I tried to learn guitar, but gave up after a few months because progress was too slow for me. I was impatient and not motivated enough and therefore ultimately didn’t get anywhere. Two years ago, I decided I wanted to learn sleight of hand card “magic”. There was one flourish in particular that I just couldn’t do, but I kept trying anyway. Day after day, I couldn’t do it and then one day I realised I could. The only difference between that and guitar is that I kept at it and out the effort in.

Sure, some people are predisposed to certain things which is a bit of a shortcut (I definitely found programming easier to learn than card magic), but I believe that most people can learn most things, if they have sufficient motivation and put in the time and effort (I include finding a way that works for you as part if effort, just doing something repeatedly may not be enough on its own, as they say: “practice makes permanent; perfect practice makes perfect” — ie be careful of learning bad habits that may get in your way)

I’m personally not against visual programming and have had some good experiences with it, but the name “no code” in my opinion completely misses the point: its still code (and programming). The text was never the hardest part, so by eliminating that, you’re not really winning much. The hard part is the logic, calculations, data manipulation and translating ambiguous requirements given by people who don’t really know what they want. Very little of my day to day is actually about the text I type into my editor, but rather the problem solving that goes on in my mind. Visual languages don’t magically make that go away, they just represent the code in a different form. Sometimes this can be really useful (visual languages make flow explicit and I personally tend to think in “boxes and lines” anyway), but often thats not the biggest roadblock. Often the roadblock isn’t the code at all.

[1] https://www.tradingview.com/pine-script-docs/en/v4/index.htm...

Most people don’t care enough though and life’s too short to spend on something when other things are more important to you.

First, without a huge amount of collusion, somebody would release the cure to beat everyone else's treatment. (Which totally does happen.) And in software, people constantly build and release tools for free while decrying paid software as evil; if neither Stallman nor Oracle is offering something, you can't bet they don't have it.

Second, making these things is hard. If you talk to programmers, we link to Programming Sucks and complain about how bad our tools are and how most software is terrible. If you talk to biochemists, you'll hear all about FDA hurdles, the rising cost and difficulty of finding new drugs worth bringing to market, and how they want to find real breakthroughs but companies can't afford speculative research.

So it can't really be the case that people are just casually choosing not to produce these things. Maybe there's a vast conspiracy that nobody's leaking, even when they're drunk and complaining about work at 2AM. But if it's not that, it has to be that we just don't know how to make this stuff happen.