231–240 of 331 posts
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There's one word counterpoint: Excel
It's interesting to me that Excel had a low barrier of entry, but more advanced stuff gets pretty unwieldy. I'm used to wiring complex SQL queries, but some Excel stuff takes me a while to understand.
Disclaimer: Which is why I am working on https://stitchiq.com/
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I think you're right about perceived barriers to entry, and I certainly didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that anyone should "just" learn to code. But I think the promise of "apps without code" is a siren song, always ending in frustration. I'd never tell anyone that learning to code is easy (only that most people can do it with some hard work), but I would also never tell anyone that tools like this will make it…
Think most people are missing the point. There are thousands of Excel users who can write fairly complex formulas using declarative rather than procedural approach. They currently share spreadsheets by email. The entire spreadsheet - all data and all formulas are shared. Maybe they want to share only a subset with some folks, and maybe they will start small and keep enhancing the apps. That's what this tool looks lik…
I think using this in the real world will be about as easy as trying to buy the right phone charger on Amazon.com. People consistently underestimate how long it takes to learn complicated interfaces. At which point you might as well just learn python.
Take any advanced 3D modeling software for example. They are visual interfaces, not command line tools, but they might as well be considering the learning curve for the average user.
Having visual buttons doesn’t necessarily mean the process of building a 3D model (or a piece of software) is suddenly easy.
I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…
However, the key here is right abstractions, sometimes seemingly tiny changes are impossible in these no-code solutions due to the abstractions that were chosen.
So no-code tools are actually extremely rigid in comparison to programming languages, but they still have a place and I believe it's still a growing industry.
Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?
Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple. frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience. They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.
So this is Microsoft Access as a service?
A spreadsheet to track a project need not be an app, the ability to temporarily give access to internal data to a non developer team (which become CSVs in email) is not an App.
It is this need of building a full solution which actually takes us away from the need of the users to the need to justify a resource for the thing.
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I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.
Indeed, I've observed that while programming seems easy, a large fraction of people find learning to program is utterly prohibitive. This includes many really smart people. And I don't think we understand why. But here's what I think you give up if you don't have code. Over the past 70 years, one of the problems that computer science has studied is how to manage the size and complexity of programs and development tea…
Did we though? Can you point out some books, or PHDs or whatever slightly more scientific and substantial than blog-post anecdotes?
I honestly believe as an industry we completely don't know how to scale development and I would love to read something that helps understanding this challenge.
I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…
I (mainly) work in inventory management and this is so very true. For our specific requirements, there wasn't anything in the SaaS space that would work short of SAP or Oracle, no other vendor had all the requirements in one package.
However, our quality control department had tasked me with writing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for most of our receiving & warehousing processes. I swear, those .docx files took longer to write than the custom inventory solution I ended up coding. However, most of that SOP time was sitting in front of a whiteboard trying to figure out how to explicitly define all the processes in detail. This experience was incredibly valuable though, I'm convinced that having to define the business process beforehand made the software vastly easier to write. I spent more time getting django configured & setup than coding the business logic, and the business logic was complicated enough that I couldn't find an off-the-shelf solution.
I've since done this for some other projects at the same company (I wear a lot of hats), and spending 1/2 a day bothering the 'customer' with my incredibly pedantic questions while we drew up a flowchart or bulleted list saved so much time down the road with catching edge case bugs. Note that I'm not talking about waterfall style dev, this only focuses on the actual business process and not at all on software. There aren't any questions about how the software should function, but instead 'if a customer has this problem, what do we do?' The trouble is, this strategy wouldn't work if you can't force the user to spend quite a bit of time on what is an unpleasant process for everyone.
I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…
It does make you cloud/product/service independent. From Amazon's (or Mendix', or what every code-without-code product/service) perspective you are not vendor-locked-in enough.