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Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

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21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#21
I've seen "low code" and "no code" solutions running at huge enterprises and it always inevitably ends up resembling a house of cards.

Proponents often cite how much quicker they can ship things and how it lets users define and automate their own workflows without waiting for engineers. The reality is that these time savings come by cutting corners from the development cycle. Because you're not doing "code", the code review step gets skipped. The authoring of automated test suites get skipped. The authoring of performance regression testing gets skipped. There's no waiting for things to bake in non-prod environments because people are changing settings directly on prod. No ones doing phased deployments with automated rollbacks here in these low code and no code environments. No design reviews mean you get solutions that are the absolute worst hacks.. Why go through the work of making "priority" a first class property on your ticket type when you can just string scan for "high" | "medium" | "low" on case titles when doing assignments?

Engineering teams could also move fast if they just threw maintainability to the wind. There's a reason they don't. If you do things the right way in these low/no code environments, the complexity is even worse, because the features are so half-baked that you can't setup proper safeguards without doing crazy amounts of escape-hatches.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#22

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

Well, the goal of COBOL was to make something that everyone could use, so that professional programmers would be obsolete. It didn't succeed, and it doesn't look like "no code" to us today, but the goal was the same.

But it's never really "no code". There's always "code", because you always have to tell the system what you want the program to do. However you tell it that, that description becomes the code.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#23
post #21

I've seen "low code" and "no code" solutions running at huge enterprises and it always inevitably ends up resembling a house of cards. Proponents often cite how much quicker they can ship things and how it lets users define and automate their own workflows without waiting for engineers. The reality is that these time savings come by cutting corners from the development cycle. Because you're not doing "code", the code…

Yeah, the biggest flaw with the low/no code solutions is that end users want, and get, access to how the workflow works and/or it ends up this giant hero workflow handling every single possible scenario.

Best to keep the task simple, pick up the response, do some sort of identification, pass on it to where it should go. That's it. Let the next destination handle more stuff.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#24
I think "low code" and "no code" just like making module. It simplifies the unlimited possibilities from code to a pre-compose and limited modules.

As you entering a restaurant, and you see the menu all the material is available to customize but having 1000 options. And you find there are a few default combos beside that. I don't think most of people will choose "customize" after they fully understand all the options.

I guess 80% people only need a basic functions. To engineer, that's a simple work. But to people who cannot code, that's extremely hard.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#25
post #7

All this posts miss the best low code environments of all time: Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately these two never made it to Internet era in big time and we have greatly come down from 90s RAD movement.

I actually use FMP for a database at my wife's work. FMP is still shipping updates and new versions.

Surprisingly you can pay to have your DB hosted on AWS. That said, it's very expensive.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#26
Also I think if low code and no code industry are more steady. It'll more like the traditional operations.

There're upstream, midstream and downstream. (Low/No code probably will be upstream or midstream) They need to take care about the QA & QC instead of normal software development flow. Because one mistake will affect all the downstream used.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#27
post #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?

Natural languages are generally full of ambiguity and not well specified.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#28
What I'm generally amazed by is MatLab. They went from a general Math IDE to being an actual physics simulation environment...that now transpiles the symbolic flow based programming view to an external C-compatible library.

With this solution they are the only alternative, dominating whole industries with it. There are so many engineers with a no-coding background that literally build programs that end up as parts of firmwares on controllers...through MatLab.

Whether that's good or not (from the security point of view) is up for discussion. But I'm kind of amazed by the "compiler pipeline" that they achieved.

Imagine something like this combined with LLVM and an LSP based backend that also integrates a no-code way to implement fuzz and unit tests.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#29
What if i tell you, code is the "no code" tool itself.

Why ?

You of course could run any code with assembly or machine language, but now we have high level programming languages, it's because we want "low-code", or "low machine-code".

The point is we want to map business problems/solutions into machine, code is just a "no code" tool which allows u to do that.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#30

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”.

I've never been afraid of code, but have definitely been put off by the steep jump in complexity needed to host the code compared to spreadsheets.
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