The essence of programming is logical reasoning. The people who are good at that are already programmers, and the people who aren't don't want to be programmers. Code isn't church latin. Attitudes, not the physical act of coding, are what limit people from building their own stuff.
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
#112I don’t even know of good standards-compliant WYSIWYGs for HTML besides maybe(?) Webflow these days, and that's proprietary. I don’t know how you’d do low-code anything today in any meaningful sense. Of all the people who care about automation, if there were good, viable low-code options, developers themselves would want to use them!
I've used a couple of those website builders you see advertised on YouTube occasionally, and they are pretty good. You can't do complicated custom web applications with them, but that's not what they are designed for. They are designed for building nice, if generic, websites quickly.
Those tools are probably what killed the market for professional WYSIWYG editors.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#113The essence of programming is logical reasoning. The people who are good at that are already programmers, and the people who aren't don't want to be programmers. Code isn't church latin. Attitudes, not the physical act of coding, are what limit people from building their own stuff.
It may be tempting for a programmer to take that view; programmers are the logical ones, and the non-programmers are either too dumb or lacks the right attitude.
I am more sympathetic to non-programmers. They may be logical too, but they just specialized in different fields or hasn't had the time and chance to learn programming. They may as well have in-depth domain knowledge and logic. These people may as well benefit from having low-code tools to further their fields.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#114I doubt anyone here on hn will be impacted in any way by such tools. If anything it would be a positive impact as these tools aren't trivial to build.
However it will impact wordpress developer types. I imagine a graph like tool where you drag and drop nodes and link inputs and outputs will make quite a few redundant. Stuff like signup -> confirmation email -> send spam every X days, or order -> get customer data -> get stock availability -> ship -> notify are such common workflows among small shops that i find it hilarious people still pay developers to implement them. Each node can be a call to an internal or external api, a db query or whatnot.
Perhaps a good opportunity for brilliant minds to take on this and _do it right_.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not unfamiliar with PHP and JS. Those account for about 90% of my work, and have for over a decade. Every language has its inconsistencies. No question PHP and JS have their faults. That’s what happens when a language gets popular (i.e. actually used rather than just argued about in programmer forums) and the deployed code base grows faster than the developers can “fix” the language. Back-compatibility then impos…
I don’t see why you are offended. I love JS but here it is 20min of programming jokes in the expense of JS: https://youtu.be/et8xNAc2ic8 As it comes to PHP, I don’t say that you can do everything by a single PHP file in a web server folder(actually, you can but not comfortably). I’m trying to illustrate it’s low-code nature. There are no other languages that are that easy to start solving your problem with. Okay, may…
I’m not offended, I have no investment in those languages, or any language. I just don’t agree.
PHP is easy for beginners because of the tooling, or lack of. As you wrote you can just put PHP files in the right folder and there’s your “Hello, world” web page. The language itself is no less capable and sophisticated than any other C-family language, and PHP’s huge (and inconsistent) standard library goes a long way. But getting a demo or tutorial page up is not software development. You have to write actual code to make even a simple CRUD app, plus understand something about databases. It’s not low code.
You can maybe learn JS in the browser console but that’s not developing anything useful. To run JS on the server you need node and npm and the skills to get that all working. Not low code either.
These are low bar to entry languages/ecosystems but they are not low code/no code solutions.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#116Relevant commitstrip: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...?
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#117This 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 spa…
I've looked at a whole bunch of low code tools in the last two years and my opinion has shifted from high grade bullshit sold by the clueless to the even more clueless ('Now: coding for managers') to where I believe that the current crop of low code/no code platforms has something real to offer and has staying power for some use cases. Specifically: lots of forms based processing backed by relational DBs with occasio…
Sure. Tools like that have been around since the ‘70s. They have their uses — building forms and reports point-and-click. But the limited scope and inevitable low ceiling of capabilities means they did not spell the end of programmers. Instead they expand the market because the non-programmers will need help when they outgrow their tools, or even sooner when they can’t figure out a JOIN or GROUP BY or how to handle record locks.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#118It'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 see Excel and PowerApps everywhere across our customers.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#119It'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…
If someone can build a low/no-code product, then the barrier to entry is so astonishingly low and there will be a ton of competition for that product. Another consideration is that these low/no-code products almost always cost money. So not only will the market be flooded with clones, rent-seeking from the provider will eat into margins. Much like the cloud is someone else's computer; SaaS is someone else's programme…
It's not like the barrier to learning basic Python is that high. Or Excel macros.
Re: 80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entry bar got lowered back in the 80s with cheap home computers running BASIC. Lots of us learned on low-end low barrier to entry systems like that. There’s no gate keeping. Anyone who wants to learn programming has a wealth of tools and languages and resources to choose from, for free. This is a replay of previous attempts to pretend to democratize programming and reduce the dependence on rare and expensive prog…
Yeah, those basic computers were fun, but having an entry level computer you could write basic programs on wasn't going to help you automate business processes, whereas writing an office macro would. That's kindof the point - to embed the functionality with the data and existing applications, so you can think of these "low code" interfaces built into online apps as the cloud version of those old MS visual basic macro…
Well anything can happen. Approaching the end of my career after 40 years programming, I’ve heard for decades (no exaggeration) how low code/no code tools would make me obsolete. For the last decade or two I’ve also heard that AI would be taking my job any day now. I don’t hold my breath. I’ll be writing code until I stop, and I predict that in ten years businesses will have more work for skilled programmers, not less.
These low code/no code tools aren’t useless, but the people who are most likely to buy them are not likely to put in the 5+ years to learn more about programming. If they do they will want to move beyond the low/no code stuff. If they don’t they will be stuck writing macros to automate their business processes, which eventually means the business is constrained by the low/no code tools.