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

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

#151

Post by pessimizer »

metadaemon wrote: post #101
pessimizer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure that the futuristic lay-person will have a better basal understanding of technology and how it's made. I feel like we actively discourage people from having an understanding of technology for fear that they will understand it and complain about it and/or be in a better position to judge the quality of alternatives to our products. As a result, it seems like more people understood basic computer operation a…

I say it like I'm sure, but honestly I worry about this. It's possible we achieved such a technological peak that future generations won't be able to understand the basics; only the simplifications, leading to the premise of Idiocracy. That being said, we've always built knowledge on top of the backs of others and never really had to deal with supporting its weight without necessarily knowing the basics. It would rea…

> It's possible we achieved such a technological peak that future generations won't be able to understand the basics

I don't think it's this, and I don't think programming is so hard (it's the business logic that is hard when you have to specify it exactingly, to reference the thread.) I think that the manufacturers of the various computers we use make it unbelievably difficult and scary to touch anything, and cast quite a bit of suspicion on you for even wanting to change anything.

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

#152

Post by cm2187 »

My experience is that the people for whom learning a bit if SQL is a bridge too far, will also not invest time into learning some complex automation software. And these no/low code software all look like complicated electrical diagrams when you are doing real life workflows.

The category of people who are ready to invest time in understanding those tools are the people who might as well spend the same time or less learning SQL and maybe a bit of python or VBA.

As for business users doing code, I wish there were more, and I think younger users tend to be a bit more technical, but it's a light breeze, not a big change.

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

#153

Post by pessimizer »

burlesona wrote: post #79
88913527 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is difficulty in developing the business requirement. I have to plead with Product owners to give me more than a few sentences about what it is they want to built. It makes no difference what the tool we use to express requirements is if we cannot have a firm grasp of the requirements themself.

This is actually the strongest case in favor of "no code" tools IMO. Get the PM to spend time actually modeling what they want, as close as they can get, in no-code tools. They get to bash their head against the wall for a while until they give up and bring in engineering. But now (a) the PM actually has some intuition around how complex things are, and (b) their no-code solution is probably a better approximation of…

That's an interesting perspective. No-code tools to enable businesspeople to write good specs.

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

#154

Post by galdosdi »

jerf wrote: post #32
danielvaughn wrote: post #7

My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. Code is perceived to be complex, but when you look deeply into what people mean when they say that, it's almost entirely a social perception. They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another…

The classic Mythical Man Month makes a crucial distinction between "accidental" and "essential" complexity. Accidental complexity is stuff that it is in your solution, but is not necessary. For example, you added a layer of abstraction that ultimately isn't necessary and doesn't have benefits outweighing the costs. Essential complexity is intrinsic to the problem itself. For example, if you write software to help you…

Everything you said would happen, I saw happpen. I literally witnessed this.

I started my career at a company that sold a graphical programming product. It's exactly the typical "no code" thing described elsewhere. Nodes and edges to implement Ifs, Loops, actions, subroutine calls, etc.

We sold this to customers but also had an in house professional services type department that used it. Those folks were indeed at a whole nother level with that tool and knew all kinds of tricks and had developed special scripts to transform the XML formatted files that the "programs" were saved in, etc. They had developed a long slew of best practices to try to tame some of the problems of the tool.

Then someone added a "execute arbitrary javascript" action and it was open season on everything...

I think when I left someone was working on a linter!

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

#155

Post by bogwog »

anonymoushn wrote: post #86
garyclarke27 wrote: post #33

I disagree with this opinion "Anyone marketing a low or no code tool to developers is targeting the wrong audience" Switched-on developers are a perfect market for good no-code/low-code tools. If a tool is 100 times more productive, why on earth would a smart developer not use it to deliver value to their customers?? I wrote a complete ERP and CRM system using our No-code platform - this would have been impossible fo…

> this would have been impossible for a single person using traditional tools such as Java I don't think so?

When someone selling you a product makes claims like this that are bordering on gas lighting, that should raise some red flags.

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

#157

Post by zozbot234 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #116

I think it's useful to flip the script a bit and ask this question: why are software developers so often stuck writing software with their only abstraction available being text? Isn't that working with one hand tied behind their back? I do a lot of work in geometric tools, and the fact that the best thing that we have for unit tests is to painstakingly construct objects by specifying their coordinate space hurts. Our…

Structural editors are not a new idea. They have well-known drawbacks wrt. supporting incremental editing of program text, which as a rule requires "passing through" invalid representations. This actually makes them quite unintuitive for such tasks.

OTOH, modern editing tools, such as "language servers", provide most of the advantages without the aforementioned issues.

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

#159

Post by ramoz »

No code is for mundane human processes and commodity development you want to get done cheaply, whether internal or outsourced. That’s already been disrupted by major platforms. These smaller platforms can only ever dream of becoming the next service now, appian, Salesforce, pega, etc.

Anyone who stays near to, or on, the bleeding edge of technology will know that no-code isn’t a real thing for them. Add some extra automation and boilerplate capabilities by all means, but software will always eat software.

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

#160

Post by analog31 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #7

My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. Code is perceived to be complex, but when you look deeply into what people mean when they say that, it's almost entirely a social perception. They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another…

A contributing factor is the belief that "everything graphical is easier."
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