Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation • Hacker News Board

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#171

Post by ludamad » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #148

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

> A better term is "visual programming" I tend to agree. "No code" seems to imply "no programming", but that's exactly what you do with these tools, just in a simplified way.

It also isn't always simpler. Once you're visually flowcharting minor text transforms "low code" is a misnomer

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#172

Post by rubyfan » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

I think the big issues present in many large companies isn’t democratic coding but interdependent technology architectures and business processes that must rely on centralized planning. In this case speed to market is a challenge due to the overall coordination burden and a hodgepodge of specialized technology and business domain logic. Coding and lack of coders generally aren’t the issue at big corps, it’s getting them meaningful instruction on what the business needs that is coordinated with all the other aspects of the business to yield productive outcomes. It’s why project costs are usually 30% developers and 70% overhead. There’s typically nothing democratic about this type of environment and low code / no code platforms can’t solve this type of issue.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#173

Post by tempacct3575 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #166

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

> in my experience these tools open the imagination of what is possible and even more backend support is needed over time. I just don't buy the argument that visual programming tools are inherently more creative or imaginative than text-based programming tools because at some point, you are going to be constrained to the UI, which always comes with tradeoffs. I recently used a visual programming environment for a wor…

> I just don't buy the argument that visual programming tools are inherently more creative or imaginative than text-based programming tools because at some point, you are going to be constrained to the UI, which always comes with tradeoffs.

They aren't inherently more creative for all people. For example there is a group of people that prefers LaTeX to MS Word - but it's undoubtable that Word is more accessible to more users. The creativity comes from letting business users directly iterate on the UI mockups and underlying process, which is possible in these tools. Instead of waiting a few months for an IT project to start, the users can create a mockup in a few days and iterate a few times before connecting to a real backend. I would have thought this was improbable 3 years ago, but personal experience has taught me that there are many business users capable of doing this.

Most of the tools created with these platforms never "ship"; the primary users are often internal. At large companies, an internal app may have 10k users. Also, YMMV depending on the tool - some are much better than others at debugging complex flows.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#174

Post by thr0wawayf00 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #139

booleandilemma wrote: post #52

A lot of non-programmer office workers I've met aren't capable of writing software. Full stop. They're simply too incompetent. It's an uncomfortable truth. I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira, business analysts who aren't able to have a written conversation, product owners who struggle to create Outlook calendar invites. Imagine asking these same people to write software rather than just…

> I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira I've been programming for 20 years and I still can't navigate Jira. The interface makes vim feel like a marvel of intuitive interface design.

8-year programmer here and I completely agree. JIRA is a perfect example of a tool that has grown so big and feature-flexible that very little is intuitive anymore.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#175

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

DarylZero wrote: post #149

danShumway wrote: post #74

Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. I can't think of many other social trends that would be more beneficial for increasing general support for user agency, data interoperability, sideloading/modding, etc... we should applaud every single attempt to democratize coding and lower barriers of entry. It…

"Computer Science was always supposed to be taught to everyone, and it wasn’t about getting a job: A historical perspective" https://computinged.wordpress.com/2021/11/26/computer-scienc...

ok only the rudiments of any sufficiently complicated field - politics, law, literature, math, physics, chemistry, biology, art etc. etc. including computer science, can be widely taught, furthermore given that time is limited and there is some showing that putting more hours of learning in actually decreases efficiency of education, it follows that the more complicated subjects we try to teach the more rudimentary our teachings in those subjects must be.

Given any sufficiently complicated enough civilization there will be enough complicated fields to maintain, and thus specialization will have to occur and some people will have to be specialized in some particular field.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#176

Post by tempacct3575 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #170

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

Visual programming is an idea that keeps coming up because there are no examples of it, therefore it would seem like a great innovation. Because there are no examples of it is precisely why it’s hard to do. Those who try either end up with something too application specific to be extended, or something too abstract to be used. Take UML, it took the abstract route. It has many diagrams, it even has flow charts. It was…

UML did fail as a modeling tool - it was just too complex. However, flowcharts have succeeded on many platforms in many domains. (Gaming engines like Godot Visual Script and Unreal Engine Blueprints, BPM tools, Enterprise Integration tools, many hardware design tools)

The best environments combine visual and code based elements so you don't get "stuck" when something is missing in the low code areas.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#177

Post by civilized » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #168

civilized wrote: post #156

For those who are skeptical of no-code/low-code, I am too, but here's perhaps a useful intuition pump / prompt for thought. Excel is a low-code tool backed by a scripting language for customization (VBA). There's no argument that this tool has enormous business value and is basically never, ever going away. So, what can't Excel do, and does it make sense for there to be another low-code tool that fills those niches?…

> (I kind of hate Alteryx at my company but it's not the software's fault, it's the company being stingy with licenses which makes people's workflows harder to learn about) This brings up a great counter-argument to visual programming tools, which is vendor lock-in. We talk about this a lot on the cloud architecture side, but surely this also becomes a concern if a commercial visual programming tool becomes an integr…

I could be OK with it if it exported some crappy machine-generated SQL, which lots of other tools can do. But yes, when you use these tools you're at the mercy of the vendor and their willingness to play well with others.

From a purely selfish perspective Alteryx is a disaster for me because I often need to see inside business process and Alteryx obstructs this more than other tools. But users swear by it so I have to grudgingly admit it's a "good" tool.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#178

Post by tempacct3575 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

tjchear wrote: post #163

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

+1 on these tools opening up people's imagination of what's possible. They're the experts in their domain, and having these tools allow them to project what they know onto a system that makes them more productive and efficient. If you don't mind answering, what were the kinds of apps or processes that business/ops folks you worked with made?

I work at a large healthcare equipment manufacturer - the group I worked with automated many business processes relating to equipment field sales, service, and maintenance. The end users were generally internal sales or field techs. Most of the apps are basic CRUD and maybe some video links. We're a typical large enterprise, so it takes a very long time to execute new software projects and often by the time they are done the business needs have shifted.

The users started out by using MS Power Platform and SharePoint to create simple apps and forms and get some feedback from the users. After a couple of iterations they would finalize the desired flow and my team would give them an enterprise integration point (sometimes Boomi, sometimes custom code) to read/update the real data. We are currently evaluating Mendix and Outsystems to see if that will further streamline the process.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#179

Post by orev » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

garren wrote: post #102

orev wrote: post #64

One of the main differences I see on the road to learning to code has nothing to do with the tools; it’s the thought process. A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’…

That's just it; the article focuses exclusively on low code/no-code solutions. The author cites examples describing business people putting together functional systems without writing a lick of code (let alone understanding the math underlying such systems.) The whole point of the article is /not/ having to learn to code. The idea is that these people are in the thick of a business problem, and given the right tools,…

> They don't need to express or communicate anything to anyone.

My point about communication is not so much the need to actually tell something to someone, but that in order to be able to communicate something, they need to know how to break down a problem into all the various components. That’s what’s missing for many business people, so whether they are communicating the problem to a developer, or to a no-code platform, it won’t work.

There will always be business people who can do this just fine, but there are far more who see themselves as the people who give commands that others just follow and have no interest in actually doing that type of thinking.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#180

Post by mariojv » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

loosetypes wrote: post #145

danShumway wrote: post #74

Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. I can't think of many other social trends that would be more beneficial for increasing general support for user agency, data interoperability, sideloading/modding, etc... we should applaud every single attempt to democratize coding and lower barriers of entry. It…

> to democratize coding Does that mean we collectively vote as to whether the next addition is a for loop? While a company may mean to make more widely accessible but used charged language, I think we should fight the urge to parrot.

One alternative definition of "democratic" is "relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people." [0] Regardless of whether this is considered charged language or not, it is a valid alternate usage of the term. I never read the comment you're referring to as anything political.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic