My experience has been the complexity is still there somewhere. Just not in the form of what we normally refer code. Often pushed down to the database in the form of bloated procedures and views. If it is not in the application layer it is "low-code".
Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#52Democratization of code will be the same as the democratization of medicine: anyone can go to a pharmacy and buy aspirin, ibuprofen, vitamins, etc. That doesn't mean physicians are jobless. Also if you have some serious problem or disease you shouldn't self medicate, but get professional treatment.
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#53I think Low-Code is the way to solve repetitive tasks and be more productive.
Current favorite low-code tool: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#54Am I the only one here who remembers MS Access? It was a great no-code/low code product that created silos of information in many organizations and it was a real PITA to transfer it to other technologies.
The advantage in MS Access was that it was part of the MS ecosystem and used VBA which is well documented. What will happen when you'll want to transfer something you've made in today no-code solutions to another platform?
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#55All 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 got into real software development by writing a inventory management tool using MS Access back in the day.
It worked great! The application even looked almost like a normal Windows app. I wrote all of it by myself without knowing much coding (though I did write lots of VBA).
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#56Am I the only one here who remembers MS Access? It was a great no-code/low code product that created silos of information in many organizations and it was a real PITA to transfer it to other technologies. The advantage in MS Access was that it was part of the MS ecosystem and used VBA which is well documented. What will happen when you'll want to transfer something you've made in today no-code solutions to another pl…
MS Access was indeed great. It was really simple to publish a site in the early days of asp that made use of it as a data source
Performance-wise sqlite probably wins, but Access had the added bonus of an extremely straight-forward UI
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#57Programming is inherently hierarchical profession, because it's one of the few that progresses by automating itself. Therefore it will never be "democratized" (by this the author means equality). At the bottom of the pyramid sit the Excel-handlers and people who "program" a few lines of pre-made templates. At this level programming is similar to a GUI, a language that appeals to intuitions of everyday life so that it can be approachable to everyone. But as you go up the hierarchy of building things-that-build-things, the wealth is increasingly concentrated. At the top sit the 1% Gurus whose job cannot be automated away, and who can command the whole economy with their choices. You can't fight this hierarchy with "nocode" toys, it takes work
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#58There aren't enough people who go into coding because most people simply dislike coding. I've seen it many times and don't blame them. I love coding, but dislike chemistry and statistical analysis. It's just not my thing
Since this is likely not going to change, these no-code tools expand the number of workers who can do stuff. But it clearly isn't as good as coding and never will be
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#59There is a space for low code solutions but you have to know the tradeoffs. I think low code belongs to initial MVPs you know you will have to re-build. Low code wont scale. Low code at some point will be an absolute pain to iterate on. Low code is super hard to collaborate on. But initially none of that matters. I think the biggest problem in software engineering is not scaling or nice code structure or design or collaboration or whatever but to build something people want to use. This goes for startups as much as for Enterprise apps.
Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming
#60The 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…
> 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 token
I think you can set that up with Postgres using row-level security and a generic "REST to SQL" frontend whose name escapes me. Harder business logic can go in stored procedures, which Postgres allows you to in a range of languages AFAIK. It seems like a great architecture to me, and it should also be some kind of simple to wrap a generator around it with a nice UI.