11–20 of 64 posts
I dunno. Maybe its time to get coffee. It is being a long day.
I see a different future. As a side-effect of pushing "automation" agenda corporations will not have needed workforce to accomplish the task. The marketing delusions and wishful thinking are popular methods of self-destruction. Sadly in the corporate world, the more you climb the less oxygen you get. And with lack of oxygen human brain is prone to malfunction. You can have some form of automation, but the need of com…
Php supports browsers?
I often claim software is a new form of literacy. And I see no-code as the equivalent of cutting up all the frames from marvel comics and tippexing out the speech bubbles, then handing them to some illiterate and saying "hey, you can write your own story now !" It's not how we (as a society) need to handle this. Edit: i.e. that is not empowering the illiterate.
> So, what is no-code? No-code development is perfect for engineers who have zero programming knowledge. It’s based on a visual drag-and-drop user interface, with no hand coding required to reach the end goal. It empowers workers to design solutions they need to overcome the challenges they face every day—without writing a single line of code. In 2019, 84% of enterprises across the US, UK, Canada and Australia had al…
Yes! I've explored visually representing functions, and state machines, but it all feels very limiting compared to written language. I think more research could be done in the visual coding area for expressing thought, because I really want coding to look like something out of neon genesis evangelion--but IDK, written language isn't bound spatially. And in written language, it's so easy to express contradictions, which is an important part of developing a system. I think MC Escher is probably the most advanced research we have in the area of visually representing recursion and contradictions lol.
I wish people would stop claiming that drag and drop program creation is not programming. It is simply a different style of programming using a different language. From Wikipedia: "Computer programming is the process of designing and building an executable computer program to accomplish a specific computing result or to perform a specific task." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming . The same claims…
Outside of tech, I think coding means green text on a black background--but I think of it more generally, describing a process that you want something/someone else to run... a cooking recipe for someone to follow, it's CODE! So yeah, to that end, visual programming is still coding. AI that generates code, well, you still have to tell the AI what to do, still coding--on that tangent, if AI code generation ever is perf…
For most people, trigonometry is enough to build stuff with. And for many ideas, a diagram communicates better than talking or writing it into an excel sheet.
There's definitely a need for some kind of simplified programming that's understandable at different levels. Simplest is for an operator, then by a maintenance technician, by a line engineer, by a controls engineer at an integrator (like me), and by applications engineers at manufacturers and distributors. The operator needs a minimal number of adjustments - this part number might have a harder material and need to run at a reduced speed, or be highly porous and need more adhesive dispensed. That kind of hour-by-hour adjustment is typically custom-built into an HMI by the controls engineer. The tools themselves need to be debugged by maintenance techs, the robot code on a teach pendant or the ladder logic in a PLC are those languages. Hopefully, the maintenance tech doesn't have to touch the structure of the program, just some of the conditions or values for certain steps. Programs increasingly expose data at certain parts of the cycle to external databases. That's the "4IR" or "Fourth Industrial Revolution" or "Industry 4.0" component, or just a spreadsheet export, depending on your altitude. T Whether that data is analyzed in Excel, an MES dashboard, or a Python script depends on the consumer.
There are DSLs at all levels, none of those people are writing assembly language. But "No code" proponents typically remove too much flexibility to the level of the implementor of the product, far removed from the end user.
> So, what is no-code? No-code development is perfect for engineers who have zero programming knowledge. It’s based on a visual drag-and-drop user interface, with no hand coding required to reach the end goal. It empowers workers to design solutions they need to overcome the challenges they face every day—without writing a single line of code. In 2019, 84% of enterprises across the US, UK, Canada and Australia had al…
This is the entire advantage too. If you read this like a hard constraint, your new job is to simply make sure you develop a high-quality model of the problem domain. The rest could be put on the business owners, especially if you can teach them a little bit of SQL (the world's most popular DSL).
Coding is really not a limiting factor in manufacturing automation. For decades everything has been built around being controlled by first relay logic and then PLCs, which implement multiple languages like ladder-logic which are basically already drag and drop. Most sensors are simple - generally they provide a boolean on/off signal, and occasionally there's an analogue output which is pretty easy to interpret. Physically placing and wiring the sensors correctly is the hard bit, not interpreting the data. There are more advanced systems, like computer vision, but they all already have user interfaces which allow you to interact with them without coding. In fact it's actually a real pain in the ass that in most cases there is no coding option, and thus everything has its own proprietary and arcane method of operation and its unreasonably difficult to get things to talk to each other.
Further, generally coding skill is not particularly lacking. Assembly-like languages such as G-Code are widely used by machines and many tradesmen know enough to hand edit at least simple programs, and the engineers on staff are generally comfortable with more advanced programming. While they're a far cry from software developers, but it's sufficient for the relatively simple cases that a no-code solution might be suitable for.
The main issue for automation in manufacturing is not versatility but reliability. A few hours of downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and a machine crash might easily cost 8 figures, to say nothing of the potential for injury or even death. Whatever difficulty there is in coding for manufacturing environments is in structuring these programs such that they are consistently accurate and fail safe. Personally, I don't find anything that makes it easier for someone to tell a machine to do something stupid particularly appealing.