For me an interesting question would be: "How would a niech, low code tools can comfortably fill, looks like?"
Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
181–190 of 208 posts
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#182I do a fair amount of pre-seed and angel investing and I've seen a _massive_ increase in the number of very early businesses that have a "product" that they've been able to build with no/low code tools. It gives non-tech founders a set of options they've never had before, in my experience. That obviously isn't viable for all early businesses and even the ones it is viable for eventually need to hire engineering teams…
I am a non-tech founder building a app on building, basically very CRM/Data centric for a specific industry vertical I work in professionally. I am pushing Bubble to its limits where I have access to approx 150m records with all sorts of other database relationships to many millions of records. To build this app in a custom software solution, I have been quoted $100k to $500k depending on the backend architecture. In…
> But you are the native Spanish speaker in my metaphor, not the folks learning Spanish way past the days they had time to learn Spanish in college, trying to build the next greatest Spanish hit song to tell their story (i.e. software app!)
To probably strain the metaphor, native Spanish speakers see this like you're struggling with Spanish so you give up and instead decide to learn Esperanto because it's easier and a few people have sold it as being a good alternative to communicate across cultures. You run off and spend 4 months on Esperanto and have a song written and a catchy tune that is well received, but when the time comes to publish an album for the Spanish speaking world, maybe you've got some notoriety built but you've still got to start over from scratch and learn Spanish. For most people, they aren't going to make a hit song on their first try, they're going to fail and have to try again, so learning those Spanish fundamentals instead of a shortcut might have been a better use of time.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#183Low/no-code tools as replacements for devs is never going to happen.
But as an "aid" to empower developers... absolutely.
The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious which is generally a good target for disruptive automation.
Of course one of the big challenges will be that devs are most comfortable coding in text-heavy non-GUI environments like the IDE or terminal, and any low-code tooling that leans on a visual interface is going to struggle.
This was actually a huge problem for me at https://rapidream.com (apologies for the shameless plug). I wanted a Figma-to-React dev-tool that I could actually use on my real "day-job" projects, but designing an interface and user flow for users who don't like low-codey tooling was almost a bigger challenge then the actual tech.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#184My 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…
Agreed 100%.
You CANNOT solve complexity by just making things "visual". Biggest low/no-code mistake.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. I worked at a company that really went in hard on Agilent Vee for hardware testing in the early 2000's. Absolutely a thing where a manager saw a "Hello World"-like demo and was so impressed that they went 100% full buy in. Besides the obvious UI issues (like the fact that you couldn't really zoom out, you could just pan around your code), we had a bunch of engineers that still needed to do things like "get the…
Yeah the main issues with visual programming are: - Logic tends to take up a lot more screen space than real code - There is no defined way to read the code. In real code you start top left and read left to right and down, but in visual code if there are lots of "paths" then your eyes end up darting around everywhere.
Text characters are always going to be way more concise than their visual representations.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#186I'm going to bang my "software is a form of literacy" drum again.
No-code is a "solution" to illiteracy. It is (snarky example alert) like taking all the cells in all the Marvel comics, cutting them out singly and arranging them in order (punch, horror, fly) and saying "now you too can write a story"
Yeah kind of.
But what we need is not No-Code. what we need are two things - more people who learn to code, and companies that make their data and processes accessible to code.
But it's like trying to start a marketplace - you need to attract the buyers and the sellers at the same time
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work out of a co-working space. A few months ago I walked past some people fidgeting with Zapier. Some (former) employee had built this crazy complex system of integrations, with connections going back and forth everywhere . It looked very much like this diagram, and I couldn't help but laugh, because it's the same kind of problem that coders face on a daily basis.
IMO, Zapier is a little different because it's connecting disparate APIs. Disclaimer: I work for Zapier.
Yeah, I think Zapier is one of if not the only example I've come across in my software dev career of a low-code-type tool that devs will reach for before doing stuff by hand.
Great example of where low-code is a better alternative for a very narrow use case of development.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another level of intelligence. Honestly: if you come to such a (dubious) conclusion, the conclusion is actually likely true (with respect to you), because if you were smarter, you would sooner or later realize the mistake in this flow of thoughts.
Can you help me be smarter?
> Can you help me be smarter?
If you want to become smarter in math: Plan to understand work that some Fields medalists of your choice produced. If available, get a modern textbook treatment of their work (these, in most cases, are better for understandable than their original papers). Of course, you won't understand much at the beginning. So you know in what areas on mathematics you have deep knowledge deficits. So get some good textbooks on these topics to fill these knowledge deficits. Iterate.
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If you want to become smarter in physics (the following advice is what a good friend of me gave who I really trust regarding this): Start with the 10 books of "Course of Theoretical Physics" by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_of_Theoretical_Physics
Having read these books should (according to him) give you at least some very basic foundation of physics on which you can then, as a next step, build by reading much more advanced textbooks.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another level of intelligence. Honestly: if you come to such a (dubious) conclusion, the conclusion is actually likely true (with respect to you), because if you were smarter, you would sooner or later realize the mistake in this flow of thoughts.
I myself had that perception before I learned how to code. I even still have that perception when it comes to math. Every single time I hear mathematicians talk on HN I feel like I hear a whole new set of words I've never heard before, and looking at math diagrams makes my brain hurt. It makes you feel stupid, but it's just an illusion.
> It makes you feel stupid, but it's just an illusion.
You realized where the mistake in your flow of thoughts is. This is, as I wrote, a good sign.
Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
#190My 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…
Yes, and I have never struggled to execute something complex as I have with no-code tools. Nocode usually makes the HelloWorld trivial and anything meaningful more challenging than it would be to do in a general purpose language.
I don't think low-code as a "generalized" solution will ever gain traction with developers, but has a future as small, focused tools to solve specific dev problems.