Great. Another ReactNative. Just what we need.
Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
261–270 of 331 posts
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#262and we're back to MS Access ! about time, really
Came here to write exactly this, but thought I'd do a quick Ctrl+F first =)
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#263These kinds of systems are all well and good if you have a person in your business with an analytical mind enough to pick it up and all your needs will fit the limits of the framework.
If your business domain has a feature that doesn't fit then you have a difficult conversation with business people who won't change their process to fit the platform and won't pay to rebuild in a platform that does fit.
If you do manage to customise Honeycomb then you're down a path of not really fitting into their model or having to upgrade on their product roadmap, not yours. I've seen SAP and Sharepoint "installations" that have been customised beyond all recognition.
Where this will fit nicely is for those internal apps where people are just using Excel or Access-like systems.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#264The looks remarkably like an Access MDB application.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. But they should. People aren't stupid, shells aren't horrifically complicated if you try a bit and once you climb that hurdle you're suddenly a "tech genius".
Just like some developers should learn that developers are users too, and not all of us enjoy doing the stuff the hard way just because it feels better somehow.
I hope you don't really believe that people use the terminal because it is "the hard way". That simply isn't true. There are things where the shell makes it _easier_ to do things - the most common being batch operations. There have been attempts to build GUIs around such tasks but they actually take more effort to understand than using the terminal.
Just like every tool, the terminal has its place. So do GUIs.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#266I 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…
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Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> one of the problems that computer science has studied is how to manage the size and complexity of programs and development teams 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 challeng…
All that stuff you already read about refactoring, patterns, paradigms, pair programming, documentation, design, architecture, mentoring: it works.
Some take these things more seriously than others though.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#268I 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…
That is exactly what some of the low-code tools aim to address: by having a visual, highly productive tool, you enable better collaboration with business stakeholders. Requirements gathering becomes an interactive process where you sit together with a business stakeholder to model your application together: by doing it in a visual manner, the stakeholder can understand what you are doing, and you can process suggesti…
This is all great until you get to the stakeholder who prototypes something in Excel (or Honeycode, I guess) and since it only "took them a few days to do this" can't understanding why scaling it up takes six months or a year and won't listen to you when you try to explain that they under-spec'd the system by an order of magnitude.
(This happened a lot when Visual Basic came out - management types would spend a weekend playing with the visual UI editor and then give the developer a week to fill in the complicated business logic behind it.)
(Developer here who has t-shirts older than a some of the people posting)
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like some developers should learn that developers are users too, and not all of us enjoy doing the stuff the hard way just because it feels better somehow.
I hope you don't really believe that people use the terminal because it is "the hard way". That simply isn't true. There are things where the shell makes it _easier_ to do things - the most common being batch operations. There have been attempts to build GUIs around such tasks but they actually take more effort to understand than using the terminal. Just like every tool, the terminal has its place. So do GUIs.
Yes I do, my UNIX experience goes all the way back to Xenix and I have used most of the UNIX commercial clones, and also did porting across multiple platforms.
Whatever the UNIX shell provides, can be more comfortably over an interactive graphical REPL, which even allows for proper graphical debugging tools when pipelines don't work as they are supposed to be.
Secondly, since UI/UX has always been one of my focus, I have seen too many throw away CLI tools that don't respect the users of the tool, because "hey they are developers as well, they can fix it, deal with its issues".
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things to add: 1) Agreed. Writing the code is the easy part. Determining and defining what to build? That's the magic. 2) In the wrong hands, making things too easy can be detrimental. First, there's add too much, simply because you can. For instance, WordPress n00bs are notorious for adding too many plugins. Why? Because they can. The second reason is, changing too soon without enough data, without enough user i…
Agreed on 2), software development has become too easy, look at all the rubish people are putting online and in the appstores. Javascript, java and python have made it too easy to write software. Would be better to return back to the days when everything was written in C and Assembly. /s
I wasn't talkind about engineerss. I was talking about no-code and the type of people who use such tools. That is, typically, no training, no understanding. They don't understand "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
I'm not knocking Honeycode and similar. I think they're great. But they are simply tools. They are at their best when they are paired with a user with some understanding and sufficient knowledge.