Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

It still sounds very robotic to me. I think Google's WaveNet sounds much more natural: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2

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 line of business apps a lot, and most of the time the requirements that they are able to articulate are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions.

And by the time you've got enough experience to be able to do that, tools like this just get in the way compared to writing some Python or SQL or C# or what have you.

It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players.

Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems.

This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings.

It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor.

https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-...

https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof...

[1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.

I see this line of thought floated a lot. Go build a fully dynamic app used by internal teams with just those three tools and tell me how it goes after you've been maintaining and building on it for a while.

Those are good building blocks but they're simply not sufficient if you are building a 'Web App' and not a 'Website'.

Also I'll cut off the inevitable, "The web was not built for this and it shouldn't become a place for apps." The world disagrees, I disagree and most people developing on the web disagree.

And I'll raise that we should be moving more towards the web being the best universal distribution platform for software.

Indeed. The hardest part of my job isn't writing code. It's in understanding the problems and working out how to solve them.