31–40 of 64 posts
I have nothing nice to say about LabVIEW. It's the very reason I changed my career from electrical to software engineering.
Whenever I see no-code in relation to manufacturing automation, only one piece of software comes to mind and it's LabVIEW. I have nothing nice to say about LabVIEW. It's the very reason I changed my career from electrical to software engineering.
It seems like every few years, we get to experience a wave of 'no code' solutions with varying degrees of success. LiveCode isn't too bad, but there is still some code there. Which bring me to my next point, the way it is described, this solution still appears to be coding... under guise of moving things around in GUI. Don't complex programs have the same kind of flow at the very outset of the design process? I dunno…
Is no-code the new trend because full automation with AI failed? I wonder if we're trying to realise what jobs actually require skilled labour.
No, it's the trend because it claims to make everything simple while pushing all of the burden back onto the customer. Did I say the quiet part?
No, you didn't.
The quiet part is "as a Service".
As a controls engineer who has integrated dozens of automated manufacturing cells, I have to say: none of the salespeople I interact with have buzzword densities this high! As nbzso mentioned, the higher you climb the less oxygen there is... 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 l…
Maybe in adjacent fields no code and IoT is a thing but in mainstream manufacturing automation I'm not really encountering it. It feels like we just moved a bit past PLCs and proprietary field busses. The main added value is not normally in rapidly changing SW that's generated by non-programmers.
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…
> 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…
So there's really two problems that are being conflated in the phrase "no code": 1. We need a richer library of standardized DSLs for various real-world environments, where the power of a full PL is perhaps too dangerous without excessive training. 2. The method of specifying algorithms in plain text (i.e. "code") is not intuitive or unapproachable for large numbers of people who could otherwise benefit greatly from…
We could do a lot worse than excel in a lot of areas I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> generally coding skill is not particularly lacking In my experience it is. Sure there are people who can go in and hack some simple code, but they typically know nothing about the clean code style that you need to make millions of lines manageable. They do okay with 500 lines programs where it isn't hard to know the whole, but don't put them on anything more complex
I think this is where standardized DSLs are needed in order to make software an effective and useful tool for nonspecialists. Doing everything in a full-featured programming language is like bringing a fully-loaded aircraft carrier to what is, in most cases, a pocketknife fight. If you only provide a pocketknife, you don't have to worry about accidentally burning down the entire city.
If only vendors didn't force users into closed, proprietary IDEs which lack many basic syntactic checks, developing for industrial control system would be much more pleasant.
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…
I don't really care if it's called programming or not but whenever I've inherited LabView or similar type of project I spent more time trying to figure out what the "programmer" tried to do than it would take to rewrite from scratch in a traditional language/environment.
As someone who does manufacturing automation for a living, I don't think this person has any experience in a manufacturing environment. 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 simpl…
When you say G-Code is Assembly-like, you just mean superficially right? I would expect G-Code to be interpreted, not assembled.