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

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

#91

Post by cardosof »

It's been around 8 years since this happened: I started learning R and a Gartner consultant told me I was wasting my time because, "as Gartner puts it", the future of data science is citizen data scientists with very little coding skills because the tools and frameworks will do all the heavy lifting. I ignored him because I liked the language anyway.

I guess every now and then someone will try to sell a tool to "build nerd things without the nerds!" be it web dev, data science/engineering, ux, devops, whatever.

I will believe in it only when I see it: everyday fellas building sustainable saas businesses on their own, without coding.

I'm less skeptical towards little internal applications though. Those don't need to be good as standalone products, they just have to be better than shitty forms/sheets and cruds companies use internally. In that space I think Retool is doing something cool and interesting.

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

#92

Post by liveinspain »

cardosof wrote: post #91

It's been around 8 years since this happened: I started learning R and a Gartner consultant told me I was wasting my time because, "as Gartner puts it", the future of data science is citizen data scientists with very little coding skills because the tools and frameworks will do all the heavy lifting. I ignored him because I liked the language anyway. I guess every now and then someone will try to sell a tool to "buil…

This. I've just built out an internal CRM for my travel company using Airtable+StackerHQ.com and for my business, it's hands down better than anything commercially available... because it covers all the nuance of our individual situation.

2 months ago, I was a bit down on no-code, but the experience on building on Stacker was good enough to change my mind. Softr.io is also getting there, too.

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

#93

Post by BiteCode_dev »

Houses are something that have been built for 1000 of years, we mater the thing. And we have the tool to build them automatically: software, giant printers, etc.

Yet we still don't.

I do think it's possible that softwares will be built more and more by automatic tools (shopify, wix and wordpress are good examples), but 80% is a tad optimistic.

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

#94

Post by staticassertion »

atsjie wrote: post #83

Having worked with Mendix and Apex (both low-code tools) for over a year: I wasn't convinced. Anytime you're trying to color outside the tool's predefined lines you'll be hurting and spending ridiculous amounts of time. But stay within their lines and you'll be fine. Because of this I don't see any real use-case for it in the B2C market. That in itself makes the 80% mentioned in the article hard to achieve. In B2B th…

> Anytime you're trying to color outside the tool's predefined lines you'll be hurting and spending ridiculous amounts of time.

This is exactly my experience. This comes up a lot when someone tries to take a 'DSL' approach to solve a general problem. "Look what you can do in just one simple line!", and it's true, one line and you've got something working.

Then you ask questions that weren't anticipated. How do I reuse the 5 lines I wrote here in another place? How do I write a test for those 5 lines? Can I log outputs in-between lines?

Those aren't exactly scary questions for any programming language - the answer is trivial, and what those languages solve for. But in these fancy no-code systems the answer is "you can't", more often than not. I care way more about how a system is going to evolve and how it will be maintained than solving trivial problems in one line.

They end up being completely unmaintainable and you lose more time than you save.

Frankly, coding isn't that hard. You don't need to be an expert to be effective, and there's a massive amount of tooling, knowledge-sharing, and investment already there.

All of this no-code shit is such a waste of time.

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

#95

Post by blablabla123 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #17
hpoe wrote: post #7

So I started my career a little bit later, but one thing I enjoy is reading about old development horror stories, it seems like all of the worst ones start with either/or 'Access Database' and 'Visual Basic'. I guess my question is it seemed like the last generation of "No more developer tools" failed, because the problem in programming isn't knowing how to code, after all it seems like pretty much anyone can figure…

> what was it like in the age of MS Access, Visual Basic, and how do the new low code tools address those? What they all have in common, in my experience, is that they make simple things very simple, but difficult things impossible. If you needed to put a form on a user's desktop and capture what they typed into it, VB was the quickest way to do that. If you wanted to make sure they only put valid dates into the date…

> What they all have in common, in my experience, is that they make simple things very simple, but difficult things impossible.

Exactly that...

I used to work at a company where all kinds of tools where in place, from normally written Code to some web-based Oracle app and even an Access-like solution. The Oracle stuff turned out to hardly work remotely and being extremely inflexible. Eventually the company was split ("un-merged"), so the Oracle app wouldn't need any further customizations. A few months later from the department that used this Access-like solution the lead was fired.

On the other hand much of the properly engineered code survived several mergers and acquisitions.

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

#97

Post by grp000 »

cardosof wrote: post #91

It's been around 8 years since this happened: I started learning R and a Gartner consultant told me I was wasting my time because, "as Gartner puts it", the future of data science is citizen data scientists with very little coding skills because the tools and frameworks will do all the heavy lifting. I ignored him because I liked the language anyway. I guess every now and then someone will try to sell a tool to "buil…

I think low code tools have come a long way. I also think the problem with low code tools is the specific problematic edge cases or implementation cases that make it hard to do without the more robust capabilities of actual code. That, and the baseline that if you can produce a low code program, you can code, for which the barrier of difficulty is constantly lowering anyway with more and more robust libraries and tools.

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

#98

Post by humbleMouse »

brundolf wrote: post #88

Something I've realized about programming as a profession is that people hire developers to build even stuff that's mostly cookie-cutter, because nothing is ever totally cookie-cutter. Every CRUD app has a few weird edge-cases that aren't covered by the framework (or low-code tool), and require you to bail out and code around it.

It’s almost like people are paying for an actual human to sit around all day and unscrew things and make sure servers stay up! I wonder if servers will ever just keep themselves up?

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

#99

Post by MathYouF »

thom wrote: post #37

There seems to be a wave of no code hype, much of it coming from the VC community, and I’m baffled as to what has happened to convince people it’s going to work this time. Is there some breakthrough tool I’m not aware of? Or is it just like this article, a bunch of pitch decks saying “if we can take just 80% of the tech market we’ll be zillionaires”?

I believe GPT-3 being able to convert descriptions of functions or designs into semi-functional code is what has some excited. It's certainly the strongest argument and reason to hope it could be different this time that I know of. I'm skeptical but come from a generative AI background so I wouldn't underestimate it will be able to do things previously unaccomplished by making templates in the past.

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

#100

Post by gervwyk »

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

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

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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.

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