31–40 of 98 posts
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…
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…
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.
A lot of it will be pushed down the stack into infrastructure. Infrastructure typically tails software, so over the next decade I would expect to see shifts in the infrastructure to accommodate this. For example, I think we'll start to see more fine-grained ACLs in databases combined with passthrough authentication from the webapp. So the nocode app is basically just a layout engine that passes a query and your Okta…
Model-driven apps on Dataverse are exactly how you'd imagine MS Access if rebuilt as a SaaS product, and they integrate with Office in various ways. One Azure tenant gets one Dataverse database-- it's certainly intended to host multiple apps sharing the database.
Main problem is that building meaningful LOB applications on this type of low code platform is difficult. Works well for a toy project, or ends up being engineered solutions maintained by IT -- neither hitting the sweet spot mark. I guess general purpose low code is hard.
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…
I've worked at a company that sold products to enterprise. There you have programmers writing complex features but you also have complex per-client requirements. Basically, software engineers maintained a nocode product that support / solution engineers use (not so much end users). So yes, there is a real programmer in the loop, but surprisingly, things also often get done without involving this programmer.
> 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.
Arrogance.
It takes 10 lines of Python to compute a multiplicative inverse mod p, using arbitrary precision integers. [1] Try doing the same thing with nothing but x86 assembly and Volume 2 of Knuth's AOCP.
It's a useful, humbling exercise.
What low/no-code does is remove the setup and tooling barrier. I believe it's this barrier which scares most people away from programming. After all, even as an experienced software developer, I find some languages more intimidating because of the many tooling choices and setup options required before one can actually do something useful (front end development, anyone?).
Ruby on Rails did this for web development 20 years ago. It's way more complex now (partly because our expectations and desires are so much more complex), but when it was new it was essentially low-code compared to alternatives. And just with modern low-code systems, people who aren't good at thinking or structuring often create bad or unreliable things.
I'm sure more than a few of us have seen some of the monstrosities created by users with Excel. On the other hand, some non developers have created brilliant solutions in Excel. The same will be true of official no-code tools.
Where no-code can really benefit most, is by allowing some end users to attempt to solve their own problems. Chances are they won't end up with complete solutions, but they may end up with a clearer picture of what it is they want; and then they can go to professional developers and better communicate their needs. Maybe we'll end up throwing away less work as our solutions will better match the users' needs.
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…
Matlab isn’t umm... no code! It’s a programming language! Stimuli I is a bit more no Cody... but it’s effectively a visual programming language
All low-/no-code solutions are programming languages. Some of them are visual and lots of them have limited tooling support outside of a narrow solution stereotype, and they tend to defy superficial expectations about programming languages, but they all are programming in one form or another.
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.
The high demand and pay of the last few decades brought a lot of people into trying to be those few but it looks like the percentage of the "worthy" people remains as low as it was decades ago and move from Fortran to lowcode did nothing.