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Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

oreilly.com

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#12

The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

One of the important issues that the no-code world hasn't really come to grips with is security. Generally speaking, you have similar security issues (not exactly the same as there are no buffer overflows or js-eval/java-object injection attacks) but the code is being written by non-experts. That means all the subtle problems of faulty business logic in which end users or third parties are given too much control is going to bite you bigly.

Moreover, it's a myth that "no-code" code is easier to read or less buggy than traditional code. Moreover the lack of propery IDE support, often improper version control, and difficulty of extracting the no-code from the platform for proper analysis makes it very hard to audit in a systematic way. And the existing security tooling can't understand it. We are going to end up with piles of this stuff, often highly privileged code, written by non-experts, running on important high value systems.

Frankly, it's a nightmare.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#13

The thing I'm finding hard to get my head around is people who are arguing that various languages such as COBOL or Python are, or might be considered low code or no code. To anyone who needs to hear this: if it's code based programming then it's not no-code or low-code - it's code. Put more simply: code != no-code

Are natural languages code? Isn't any symbolic representation code?

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#14
post #6

The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

You end up with the crazy profile system of salesforce. And if you’re the platform winner, people get certifications for your low code platform.

Or Salesforce marketing cloud…it’s even worse than sfdc

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#16
> Another way of looking at low-code is to take an even bigger step back, and look at the history of programming from the start. Python is low-code relative to C++; C and FORTRAN are low-code relative to assembler; assembler is low-code relative to machine language and toggling switches to insert binary instructions directly into the computer’s memory.

That is the most stupid thing I've read in a while.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#17

The thing I'm finding hard to get my head around is people who are arguing that various languages such as COBOL or Python are, or might be considered low code or no code. To anyone who needs to hear this: if it's code based programming then it's not no-code or low-code - it's code. Put more simply: code != no-code

There no such people. Only idiots being obtuse and moving their agenda using bogus comparison.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#20

Let me tell you: no/low-code solutions can be just as hard as if not harder than actual code in some cases. One of the more difficult engineering solutions I have had to implement in my career was with a tool called Tasktop, which synchronizes different requirements analysis tools like Jira, Jama, GitHub Issues, etc. No actual code is involved (unless you need to add customization scripts), but you definitely want ex…

It’s not that low code isn’t hard, it’s that it isn’t code. Which for the life of me I will never understand. But I’ve seen entire businesses run on linked spreadsheets with formulas that would melt your brain. All built by people terrified of “code”.
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