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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?

#171

Post by tinco »

haunter wrote: post #39
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #14

No. But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding". There are plenty of "no/low code" CRUD app builders, tools that manipulate components on a canvas to create web pages, even tools to integrate different systems together. But the second you need to go off the trail, you've now got a big problem: you're constrained to doing things that don't break the no/low code environment, and that'…

>But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding" 100% agreed Came up in another thread recently but Unreal Blueprints is a good example of that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's robust and perfectly fine, you can even build full games without any coding at all. Is it useful? Yes, but it would never replace "real" coding. Yet I'm excited to see any adva…

Unreal Blueprints isn't low code, it's just code, and it doesn't need to replace "real" coding because it is real coding.

It does raise the question where the line is. Something that I'd consider a low code / no code platform is webflow. My non programmer CEO used it to create our marketing website, and it solved something for us that normally is a very highly technical problem. He had a couple small visual glitches, he asked me to help and I discovered that it actually was a pretty thin abstraction layer over some good practice CSS, and so the glitches were easily fixed by me thanks to that.

Blueprint makes a programming language easy enough to use that a non experienced programmer might have a go at it, but in the end it's really just the outstanding library that makes it so powerful, you still need programming skills to solve programming problems with it.

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

#172

Post by chasd00 »

hkleppe wrote: post #73
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…

> My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. I get your point. But without low/no-code tools I would argue a lot of simple workflows have to be implemented using code. These usecases, where the technology-side is simple, is a good fit for low/no-code platforms IMO

The magic will always be in deciding where to stop using low/no-code and start using actual code. domain specific and opinionated low/no-code tools with clear boundaries on what the tool can and can't do would be a good thing but the markets would be small and that's a bad thing.

I've seen teams spend a lot of time in low/no-code tools and either it grows more complex than actual code or they resort to the escape hatch (node that executes user defined code) and the visual tool basically becomes a container for actual code.

Also, the dream usually is put the effectiveness of software developers into the hands of people who are not software developers. However, it never seems to fail that the low/no-code work ends up back in the lap of software developers because of the typical product/project delivery lifecycle.

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

#173

Post by sbf501 »

drewcoo wrote: post #109
sbf501 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automobile engines are also very complex, but no one talks about no-mechanic cars. In highschool where I grew up, the bottom academic 50% of boys ended up being mechanics of one type or another. At one point in time, being an auto mechanic was an elite, rare profession, and that complexity was encapsulated as something that low-performing academic students could bank on for a career. I see the exact same thing with c…

Low code isn't about tinkering under the hood. It's about going places. Most cars have automatic transmissions now. Cars don't have manual chokes anymore. They're reliable enough now that most people don't need to know anything about repair, engine or otherwise, whereas that used to be widespread knowledge.

Yes, I agree. I thought that was obvious in my response. Modern cars are "low code", so mechanics don't need advanced degrees to fix them. Also: "the complexity is eventually abstracted away", which is exactly what you are saying.

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

#174

Post by haunter »

tinco wrote: post #171
haunter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding" 100% agreed Came up in another thread recently but Unreal Blueprints is a good example of that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's robust and perfectly fine, you can even build full games without any coding at all. Is it useful? Yes, but it would never replace "real" coding. Yet I'm excited to see any adva…

Unreal Blueprints isn't low code, it's just code, and it doesn't need to replace "real" coding because it is real coding. It does raise the question where the line is. Something that I'd consider a low code / no code platform is webflow. My non programmer CEO used it to create our marketing website, and it solved something for us that normally is a very highly technical problem. He had a couple small visual glitches,…

>you still need programming skills to solve programming problems with it

Maybe that's the line is? You can create applications but you won't be able to debug once you run into a problem/bug

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

#175

Post by narcraft »

lofatdairy wrote: post #80

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 th…

Can't believe I had to scroll this far down to see the first mention of Excel. I'm an Excel wiz turned junior dev. My biggest limitation usually was integrating with other software/systems, but power query actually covered a lot of use cases. Excel dominates that liminal space between software engineers and end users

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

#176

Post by mikkergp »

daniel-thompson wrote: post #55

I tend to agree with Randall Munroe on this: > You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. ( https://xkcd.com/568/ )

Totally agreed, really the goal of any programming whatever is to determine how easy is it to model the related logic. Low-code/No-code is not some magic bullet, it's just another way of doing it. The question has always been how well can you abstract certain well known logic. Rails makes it so you don't have to interact with networking primitives... Until you try in a way that doesn't match that. But there are a whole mess of crud apps in the world. The real thing that I think low code will hit up against is scale. Everyone in the world can write twitter in a CS 101 class, but scale means a closer connection between the business logic and the technical implementation and I think you'll run into the 9 foot ladder 10 foot wall problem. Low code/No Code will be increasingly useful at building larger and better apps, but the problem spaces and scale will continue to grow.

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

#179

Post by RajT88 »

lofatdairy wrote: post #107
RajT88 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel wizards who consider themselves non-programmers, end up with what I would consider programming skills. And this is the rub with low/no-code solutions. To use them effectively, you have to have some programming skills already. They are perfect for lazy programmers, but less so for "Citizen Developers". At least, I haven't come across any I was really impressed with as a "Citizen Developer" platform. I would happ…

Honestly, I might be wrong, but in my experience the target consumers for no-code/low-code aren't the people completely intimidated by computers or navigating software in the first place. However, someone who wants to build a tool for themselves or someone else are not necessarily experienced enough to build it using code, and these seem to me to be the ones who are more likely to turn to a low-code solution. In the…

I'm not sure we're talking about different things.

> in my experience the target consumers for no-code/low-code aren't the people completely intimidated by computers or navigating software in the first place.

These tools are definitely not for them, I agree.

> Low-code solutions seem to be just a lower on-ramp.

Agree.

> a lot more people can "code" than can write programs in the sense that they fundamentally can abstract the necessary logic, but are intimidated by the unfamiliar work flow.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here. But - the way people talk about "Citizen Developers" is, it's the people who know the business logic really well, they know their tools really well also. Spreadsheets, web forms, even some databases perhaps. But not "coders" per se.

So you start with a person like this. They want to automate something using a no-code solution. Sooner or later, they're going to have to parse some input file, hopefully something structured like JSON or XML. They have to learn about parsing such files, which is by any measure a programming skill, even if they're using a no-code tool for it. They need to learn the principles of it to make it work for them. And thus:

> Citizen developers can be born from this demographic of people

At that point you're training a developer.

> the problem is that the tools available are often too limited to stick with and don't allow for production solutions.

This is also my experience. But if we imagine evolving all those tools out there to be production reliable, and flexible enough for whatever task... You still have to take on the journey of training a non-programmer to be a programmer of some stripe. You don't end up with the dream of non-programmers intuitively building production apps out of thin air.

Visual Basic I believe was born from the same idea, of making more intuitive tools so people could focus on the business logic, and less the fiddly bits of coding. But make no mistake, Visual Basic produced programmers, and not business people who built apps.

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

#180

Post by 999900000999 »

What I really like is visual scripting which compiles to code, that you can then edit and use for your application.

There's a plug-in for blender called Armory which does this. It's only for game development, but I think something like that could really revolutionize software development. Let people drag and drop, and customize.

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