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

80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 230 posts

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#41

Post by Closi »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #26
chadash wrote: post #6

This really depends on how you define tech... Is a static website made with SquareSpace tech? Is an excel file tech? I'd argue yes, and if so, then I'd bet that number is much higher than 80%.

So many horse and buggy makers in these comments that can’t see what you see. They think that because some SaaS app they build required so much custom login that low code won’t make a big difference in their world view. What low code really represents is making automation more accessible for more common tasks without knowing how to develop software. Zapier but for more complex tasks. 20 years ago you had apps like Dr…

Someone who gets it!

Lowcode isn’t designed to replace all code, it’s designed to replace boilerplate CRUD apps with only a thin bit of logic. Often these are the internal apps too that aren’t worth the investment of a “fully coded” solution.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#42

Post by foxbee »

I'm the co-founder of Budibase, an open source low code platform, and 70% of our signups 30,000) are from IT.

Low code abstracts a lot of the coding effort, but it's still inherently complex to build applications. The code is only one part of the puzzle.

For us, it's more about speeding up the dev process for IT profs and removing the repetitive, grunt work.

For ref: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#43

Post by routerl »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #18

No No No There is such a thing as software literacy just as there is a thing called literacy. We spend the first 15-20 years of life teaching literacy so that a young person will be productive in life. What makes us think it's going to be different with software? The idea of low-code is like the idea of writing a novel by cut and pasting loads of blank comic book panels carefully crafted by Marvel Studios. This job u…

Fully agreed.

A former employer once decided to empower non-technical users to design their own integrations using zapier. It was fine until someone wrote an action that changed a cell on a spreadsheet, which triggered another action that, itself, triggered the original action. A more software literate user would likely have noticed the infinite loop. That was not a fun week.

And anyway, this specific case was all to keep two calendars in sync, for which there are simpler and more reliable solutions. Even this awareness, of knowing when to look for something instead of making it yourself, is part of software literacy.

It also strikes me that the hyperfocus on UX that we've seen in the past, say, 20 years, has systematically removed users' ability to gain software literacy the way it was mostly done in the past: by tinkering. Current young users are mostly clueless about the workings of their apps, since their attention is so well held by apps' prescribed interactions.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#44

Post by dorkmind »

> We’ve all been hearing the hype lately about low-code and no-code platforms.

This is the first sentence of one of these "articles". It's a classic buzzword, just another brand of enterprise software marketing gimmicks.

Anything to keep people from using, say, 3x5 index cards in an innovative way or applying the concepts like RACI matrix outside a computing context, to the organizational structure itself.

This entire ecosystem is fascinating; I highly recommend working in enterprise software for at least 18 months, which is how long I made it before my brain short circuited.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#45

Post by Ekaros »

More powerful tools don't solve the problem that you still need to understand what you are doing and how to achieve that in a way computers do it correctly and reliably. I don't think that entry to software engineering and development is simple. And it might not even be something that most people are capable of.

Yeah, you can show anyone how to mash blocks together, but to have them make something usable and working that can be expanded or changed is much higher barrier.

Same with AI. You still need to define lot of things to get right output for given input. And some of the cases are very complex.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#46

Post by gervwyk »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #18

No No No There is such a thing as software literacy just as there is a thing called literacy. We spend the first 15-20 years of life teaching literacy so that a young person will be productive in life. What makes us think it's going to be different with software? The idea of low-code is like the idea of writing a novel by cut and pasting loads of blank comic book panels carefully crafted by Marvel Studios. This job u…

First off, disclaimer, co-founder of Lowdefy [0] and shameless plug. But feel ok since it is on topic.

I 100% agree with you on this. We’ve built many back-office tools for customers and the bulk of the engineering time goes into understanding the problem and tranlating that into data. Tools like Lowdefy make it a lot easier to put this translation into action, but the real work is done by a data literate employee.

We believe that role will stay with it the IT / dev department, at least for any project / tool larger than a Airtable. It use to be all tools larger than a spreadsheet or access DB, but now that scale has increased slightly but not much.

For this reason we are designing Lowdefy to be a dev first low-code platform. By writing apps in a DSL you get the following advantages:

- No steep learning curve for new devs :: All devs are familiar with DSLs. - Apps follow a structured schema :: Easy to pick up where others left off. - Nothing is hidden in a GUI :: You can copy, paste, find, replace, review changes, duplicate repos, etc. - Create and manage apps with code :: Develop scripts, like a visual app builder. - DSL files work with all dev tools :: Devs want to use their favorite tools.

[0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

----

With all this said, you can optimize with tools as much as you like - most dev productivity is always lost in building the wrong things.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#47

Post by gregjor »

This idea gets recycled every generation. I can’t count how many “low code” no-programming-skills-required tools I’ve seen come and go in the last four decades. Both COBOL and SQL got presented in these terms. I’ve yet to see a “non-technical manager” write a non-trivial SQL query, much less know how to confirm they got the correct results.

The various 4GL tools that proliferated in the 90s led to complex amateur spaghetti code apps in Access and FileMaker and 4th Dimension that didn’t scale, with no way to break through the inevitable limitations of the tools. And few people wanted to learn to use those.

As other people commented the hard part of programming is not the language or tools, though those can be damned hard to master. Translating requirements into code is the hard part. If that was easy to automate we could have built code from UML diagrams drawn by non-programmers decades ago.

The most widely-used low-code tool is Excel, for some time now. Easy to use, sure. Not so easy to use correctly and accurately.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#48

Post by throwaway2016a »

homarp wrote: post #10
throwaway2016a wrote: post #2

Put this here to see what the HN community thinks of this trend and the 2024 projection.

Who build the low-code tools and 'add-on' if not IT? low-code tool might maybe get us back to where we were earlier with VB... but there was a cottage industry of OCX controls, again built by IT. Same thing is/will happen with 'low code' tools: they all have their internal market, where "IT" sells what can not be done with the low-code tool. And then, it's like Excel or MsAccess... it works until it does not (or the…

That's a good point though I think most apps are CRUD and ETL and are very repetitive.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#49

Post by mrtksn »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #18

No No No There is such a thing as software literacy just as there is a thing called literacy. We spend the first 15-20 years of life teaching literacy so that a young person will be productive in life. What makes us think it's going to be different with software? The idea of low-code is like the idea of writing a novel by cut and pasting loads of blank comic book panels carefully crafted by Marvel Studios. This job u…

A lot of the developers these days tend to be integrators. The no-code tooling can help actually take that procedure to a higher abstraction where understanding of the system would still be needed but understanding of the low level details of coding can be completely eliminated.

Think languages like JS or PHP. World have been built using these and many of the developers in these languages don’t have understanding on how computers actually work. People can built money making code with these without learning about data types. Both are regarded as low quality languages but both are extremely productive.

Also, many people who don’t know any computer languages are programming in MS Excel all the time.

Sometimes, some tools are simply extremely productive and intuitive when the mental model of the domain you are solving problems matches the way these tools work.

Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

#50

Post by randcraw »

Predictions like these always overlook where 90% of the software lifecycle really takes place: legacy code.

Code-generators-for-the-masses my be able to create new code but it can't modify, extend, repair, or maintain old code. To change an app, all code generators require that you modify the app's configuration and then generate all new code. That works fine if you know what part of the configuration caused the failure. Otherwise the generator will continue to generate bad code and you're forever screwed. Anyone who generates code from high level specs but doesn't know how the code executes on the computer will be mystified by a misbehaving app or by error messages, and unable to diagnose, must less fix, problems that arise.

Think of a car that's designed and built by automation. If the automaton has no idea how to fix the car when a part fails during its lifetime, the only way it can repair the car is throw the whole car away and generate a new one. But with the problem undiagnosed, the same bad part will cause the second car to fail in the same way the first one did.

The software life cycle is about much more than writing new code.

Post reply on HN