Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

Perfect way to say it, yes. It's a mirage in the desert that we'll be chasing forever, because to the business stakeholder's eyes, the water is just right there over that hill.

> As someone who got their start in tech with a low-code environment (ServiceNow reporting) I have found the true value of low code is the ability for business/ops teams to create tools that serve their needs without waiting on a team of "real" developers to make time for them.

This is because a lot of so-called "real developers" nowadays think their job is to keep up with the latest fads and finding ways of chopping the business needs in a way so they fit better to the popular framework of the day.

Business quickly grow tired of hearing "that's not possible" when what the developer actually means "what you want to do is against the architecture of the framework I've decided we must use". If the business insist, the developer spends a lot of time fighting the framework.

Now, from a job market perspective, it is entirely understandable that the developer prefers to do RDD - resume driven development.

But it also makes it fully understandable that the business people wants to find ways of solving their needs, that do not include waiting on the "real developers". Hence the Excel and Access monstrosities present in every org.

> the true value of low code is the ability for business/ ops teams to create tools that serve their needs without waiting on a team of "real" developers to make time for them.

I agree with this.

There is a hidden market that exists between "Developers" and "End Users".

With Pure Data, I found this in the games and interactive audio industry where much of the procedural sound we made was done by "artists" essentially. Rapid prototyping using visual languages gave "good enough" code that could be exported to C/C++ later for embedding.

Again I saw that with LabView in industrial modelling, where engineers who are not at all "expert" coders could work within their domain of expertise and spit out code (also through tools like Matlab/Octave and NetLogo) as basically a very advanced (demonstrably working) "requirements spec" to any developer who wanted to take it further.

The win comes when you realise the lifetime of many rapid prototypes is good enough, and real developers are expensive enough, that the no-code "mock-up" is the actual product.

It happened with a job I did for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, when I showed the POC that took a few hours to knock together and they said, that's good enough, just put that demo into production as is. The scope was only a 7 day campaign.

I see no-code as a peoples' config language that should basically replace the interface of devices like Android. Kids as young as 6 can understand stick and box dataflow diagrams. When "The diagram is the program", configuring things like privacy settings or app preferences might better be done in this domain.

That doesn't make developers who use real languages obsolete.

Disrupt, yes. Replace, no. Programming is moving to ever higher levels of abstraction. It's just a continuation of the trend. You'll still have the lower levels when you need them. It reminds me of WordPress. It will get the job done for most people but at the end of the day it's a piece of crap.

I think no code/low code solutions certainly have a place, but the way they're currently designed is not necessarily helpful (I've worked on replacing integromat and automate.io solutions in the past). Those solutions are fine, for the most part, but they're main flaw is that in order to get anything done you have to integrate them with other tools/software, which means that you're limited by what parts of the api the developers exposed to the no-code. That and the abstractions they produce on the UI end can be confusing and difficult to navigate. That's less their fault and more of an outcome from being a shiny new tool trying to do everything, but it results in a solution that doesn't really work for the people who would go for a low-code solution in the first place.

A good model in my mind is Excel. The amazing part of Excel is that it can be used as a no-code tool, a low code tool, and extended with code macros. Even self-described non-coders who would otherwise be intimidated often use to extreme productivity. It's extremely visual, straightforward, and self-contained for the most part. The fact that it's so well documented as well is also hugely important. The no code solutions I've seen and worked with usually are fairly lacking in this regard, but excel has fairly clear documentation, the famous f1 key, and a support line[^1] which makes it a more default choice. The only problem is that integrating it with your other tools relies on either 3rd party plugins, a coder, or integrating specifically w/ other ms software.

[^1]: I had a professor state in a comparison between MATLAB and Python that the reason to choose MATLAB was that they had a customer support line. This wasn't a CS professor, so you shouldn't underestimate how much value is placed on talking to a human rather than RTFM by non-coders.