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The “No Code” Delusion

• zubairq 7y ago
  Having made a no code tool myself at yazz.com I definitely agree with many parts of this article. For prototypes or very simple one screen crud apps no code can be the right fit
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• CraigJPerry 7y ago
  Is it no code or no programmer that’s the goal. The latter seems reasonable if you’re software product customer that would like to trim out the person between you and the product that seems to be slow only to misunderstand what’s needed. E.g. if you could get the end product with Less waiting and miscommunication. I can see that being a sales pitch that resonates
  • satanspastaroll 7y ago
    >or no programmer That seems to be the gist of it. SaaS seems to tackle this specific issue by trying to move everything away from the customers in the first place. Don't need sysadmins or software devs(here) if they're in the cloud(over there). Their pricing model is often advantageous to smaller companies aswell; only paying for what you use, even if that price is ridiculous per unit sold, it still often beats hiring dedicated staff. This effect lessens over time as company grows.
• mmerlin 7y ago
  "Low Code" is currently where it's at. Intelligent subject-matter experts who are non-programmers can build 80 to 90% of their business info capture and reporting requirements inside the walled garden of their chosen platform. Programmers are called in temporarily to complete the final 10 to 20% of the LowCode app, and integrate with external services. It's been happening since Excel, through to Wordpress and nowadays splintered into 100's of directions and platforms from Wix to Podio to Notion.so
  • satanspastaroll 7y ago
    That is because we've built tools that are good enough for most use cases, and the cases don't actually differ all that much. For every new case however, new software has to be made. It isn't getting any easier, there is just more of it now. The problem is that a "problem" is essentially a fractal; it needs a defined accuracy and scope to be solvable. Differing scopes and accuracies again require overhauls of software that would otherwise be acceptable for the same task.
  • yebyen 7y ago
    I'm compelled to invoke the "Ninety-Ninety" rule when I hear about solutions like that, although I'm sure it works sometimes, in my experience it usually turns out more like this. The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time!
    • lucasverra 7y ago
      Isn't the majority of software following this rule ? This is not specific of low/no code environment
      • BigJono 7y ago
        Yes it is, but if you're doing the first 90% properly you have a much better shot at mitigating the difficulty of the last 10%. I think there's some vague point in any project where it goes from being 'easy' to 'hard' to add new stuff. Basically the only factor that matters for productivity is how long you can delay that point. If you just do the first 90% as quickly and cheaply as possible, you're just resigning yourself to hitting that point as early as possible.
        • yebyen 7y ago
          I think this is best explained without exaggeration by the famous Design-Stamina Hypothesis[1], which states the notion that time spent on Design is something which you can trade away to improve development speed, is reliably false in the long-term (even if it seems to be working in the near term.) The graphic also suggests that there is an inflection point, as you suggest, before where time spent on design really is just slowing you down in the beginning of your project, but also that the costs of waiting too long to switch modes (from doing no design, to doing good design) after you have crossed that line, are substantial and compounding; the longer you wait, the more your lack of good design costs. And of course, not pictured, is "bad design" which can be even worse than no design. Trying to find that inflection point and put it on your development schedule in advance is also a bit like trying to catch a falling knife (not likely to succeed.) [1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DesignStaminaHypothesis.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DesignStaminaHypothesis.html
• Eikon 7y ago
  While I agree with the author, it's only true when speaking of software that requires custom logic. For instance, "no-code" website creation offering has done wonders in replacing the "install wordpress on a very crappy cheap host and let it rot with vulnerable plugins" paradigm.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Is that very different from the websites of the 90s? I distinctly remember creating a somewhat-dynamic site in FrontPage, then rendering it into static HTML and FTPing it to the webserver. Perhaps this was an impedance mismatch: "web requires coding" - it mostly doesn't, most people would be okay with a better HTML editor, and providing that via WP was a historical quirk.
    • cm2012 7y ago
      The no code websites are so much better now. Shopify powers a ton of big eCommerce now, for instance.
    • rchaud 7y ago
      Those would be examples of static sites, which are "read only" to most users. Wix, Squarespace etc can handle form submissions and online payments of course. And with third party solutions like Intercom and Optimizely, things like customer support chat and A/B testing can be done with pretty much no code.
      • ptx 7y ago
        Web hosting companies in the old days often provided a collection of CGI scripts that users could invoke from their HTML pages, things like counters, e-mail form handlers, guestbooks and other popular functionality.
• malux85 7y ago
  Cute article, but worthless and shallow. Sure you can replace 4-5 lines of python with some box-based UI rule system, but anybody who’s not first week out of a 2 week coding boot-camp knows that the devil is in the detail. What if instead of “display error” it’s “try again if it’s a mail server error up to a maximum of 4 tries then email the administrator and save debugging info” Then what about a loop? Have you ever tried to debug a loop in a UI programming environment? What about a complex loop with custom data types and no ability to see a stack trace or variable list? You gotta put print dialogs and system exits all over the place, and oh, the print dialog only prints a small string? Now you gotta do 1 variable at a time, 200 times to debug. Now I’m showing this to the “non-coder” who’s thinking “this is a giant headache” - and you know what??? HE IS RIGHT, because we have both been forced to use this crappy, blunt tool. Wasn’t this supposed to make things EASIER? Now the business guy AND the programmer are tied up trying to shoehorn what would otherwise be trivial for the programmer into this weeks novelty rinky-dink “no code” tool Ui drag and drop replacements only work for trivial examples, or they become a giant unmaintainable spaghetti diagram that’s so complex you can’t even follow the lines, let alone understand program control flow. The fundamental problem with existing software is composability. Us geeks have it at the command line, but regular users can’t pipe their brower through grep them to their printer, Users are stuck with the fixed options available at software design time, if we could standardise a composable interface on all software (I don’t think “bytes” is the right abstraction for this, it’s too low level) then users can start dynamically composing their own solutions, which will take a decent shift in thinking for most people - but a generational cycle will fix it if young kids grow up taking composability for granted
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    That's... exactly what the article says.
• q3k 7y ago
  This delusion is especially visible in the DevOps space. For some reason we have decided as an industry that instead of writing some code in whatever 'real' language we will base operational work on YAML with ad-hoc templating and stringly-typed programming constructs. The main culprits are Ansible/Salt and all the string-templating based tools for Kubernetes (Helm/Kustomize/...). Especially with tools like Helm I believe we reached peak insanity levels. Instead of using a general purpose or configuration-specific (like Jsonnet/Cue/Dhall) programming language to build and then emit in-memory objects to YAML manifests, the industry is using YAML to define templated YAML and then parametrize this templating with even more YAML. Now we just write complex declarative configuration with no debugging facilities, a non-existent type system, inversion of control that usually ends up working against us and no way to interact with external data apart from stringing everything together with fragile shell scripts. But hey, there's no need to write a single line of Go/Python/Java/Ruby!
  • UserIsUnused 7y ago
    Thank god trends like Pulumi and the new AWS sdk is emerging. General purpose programing languages are getting more expressive by the day, why do we use data serialization languages instead for configs? it doesn't make any sense. Configuration is code not data.
    • q3k 7y ago
      I still have my reservations against Pulumi in particular, though. I've only really skimmed their documentation, but the idea that calling 'new' against a VM class instantiates a VM in production seems to be to magical for my taste, and might be an indication that it's yet another product that targets the happy path more than what we tend to experience in production: failures.
    • reallydontask 7y ago
      The main problem is that, in my experience, the majority of DevOps teams are Ops teams that have been renamed and refocused towards automation. These are people that by and large don't want to code, not saying that they can't or won't. To be fair this has been in Windows shops, where scripting has only recently (last 5-10 years) taken off, so you've got a lot of windows admins that the closest they've been to code is Batch scripting with a bit of Powershell. This is a big change for them As it happens i read about pulumi recently and I've put it on mt list of todo things, but I can't see that I'll be able to sell it to our team and our team is blessed (cursed?) with three former developers
• RickJWagner 7y ago
  The idea isn't new. I first saw it as '4GLs', which were higher-level languages. Later we had rule engines and now AI. Programmers never go away, though. Besides the need to write the customizations that the higher level languages miss, there is the need for disciplined thinking and testing. No matter how simple the tools become, the need for these remain.
  • brazzy 7y ago
    You forgot about "model-drive development". And before that, COBOL was sold on the same pipe dream.
• mikece 7y ago
  I've been hearing about "no code" or "no programmer required" business solutions for over 20 years. Cynically, I encourage this thinking because my billable rate to untangle someone else's hot mess when urgent deadlines are looming goes up. Practically speaking, if the business problems being solved are complex you might be able to pull off a low-code solution but without knowledge and practice of the essential architectural patterns of software development a novice will paint themselves into a corner before they even know what they are doing, requiring an expert to come in an clean things up.
  • osullivj 7y ago
    Nearly 40 years for me; I remember reading about The Last One [1] back in 81. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
    • brazzy 7y ago
      The pipe dream is far older than that. Around 1960 some people seriously claimed that within about 5 years there would be no more professional programmers because with this new language, everyone could write the software they need themselves, since it was so easy to use. The language was COBOL. Oh, and look, this one still seems to be around: http://www.makeyourownsoftware.com/ http://www.makeyourownsoftware.com/
      • yhoiseth 7y ago
        Thanks for sharing—that site is a real gem!
      • zokier 7y ago
        > Around 1960 some people seriously claimed that within about 5 years there would be no more professional programmers because with this new language, everyone could write the software they need themselves, since it was so easy to use. Of course that prediction seems quaint now, but I posit that the prediction failed because they greatly underestimated the increase in demand of software as much as overestimated the expressiveness/productivity increase of COBOL (and later systems). Heck, considering what a professional programmers job might have been like in the 50s, its not far fetched at all that such profession indeed has disappeared as modern programmers work at such a different level of abstraction
• emilecantin 7y ago
  I read somewhere a quote that stuck with me: "No tool is ever going to free us from the burden of clarifying our ideas." And that's how I view my job as a software developer: clarifying ideas. Any "No Code" tool is still going to either force you to clarify your ideas, or have a large amount of assumptions. "Idea People" and "Business" don't like that, so they'll probably end up delegating the use of "No Code" tools to programmers of some sort.
  • worldsayshi 7y ago
    There are plenty of tools that help us in clarifying our ideas though. Take mathematical notation for example. Or music notation. Or a CAD program. All are examples of domain specific tools that allow the user to specify their intention in a non-ambiguous way. And they also allow the user to think about and experiment with the problem space. I think what we need is something akin to this. The "business logic" that we are talking about here is to me a non-infinite domain. It should be possible to boil it down into a domain specific tool that is more helpful than a general purpose programming language.
    • taneq 7y ago
      They all help, yes, but you still have to know what you’re trying to achieve.
    • bitcuration 7y ago
      Business domain vs. Math., that's an interesting comparison. The problem is that business domain is exact an "infinite domain", in comparing with Math. Or to say that the competitive nature of business is very much reliant on its ability to break its domain boundary. Again, not so much in the case of Math.
      • marcosdumay 7y ago
        > Again, not so much in the case of Math. I will resonantly disagree here. Math is successful exactly because each time it had a rule that was problematic, people just extended it. And the success of modern (20th+ century) Math is caused exactly by the fact that we got an inifinitely extensible language, so nobody has to ever break it again anymore.
• neilwilson 7y ago
  Fred Brooks - No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, Vol. 20, No. 4 (April 1987) pp. 10-19. https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html Read and inwardly digest
  • keawade 7y ago
    Yes! I think this line in particular is a good TL;DR of the issues discussed in the linked article: > The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.
• boyadjian 7y ago
  Whatever the abstraction of the language you use, you still have to code. It's just a different type of coding.
• lidHanteyk 7y ago
  I agree with the author in all points about the no-code movement and goals, but disagree with the larger points about software development and engineering in the business setting. In particular, the attractiveness of no-code should not be that one does not have to have in-house software development, but that one has less technical debt and thus smaller technical interest payments. Businesses will always have problems with computers, because computers are rigid and unyielding, while businesspeople are soft and compromising. It is all to easy to read the beginning few paragraphs as the sourest of grapes: The businessperson, having embraced fax, email, paperless, Web, and mobile, is nonetheless no closer to having embraced computer. The "traditional sense" of creating software is derided as "expensive, in short supply, and fundamentally [not quick at] produc[ing] things." But that is all explained neatly by market forces: Developers are expensive because competency is rare because understanding is low because computerizing is a painful commitment because operationalizing a business is equivalent to automating it away. Computers reveal the rent-seeking and capitalization simply by being themselves on their own.
• DonaldFisk 7y ago
  BASIC was an attempt to allow people to write software in what looked like English, and indeed it was extremely successful (cf. Visual Basic). The language designed to look like English was COBOL. BASIC looked nothing like English. The reason it became popular was because you could develop programs interactively - edit, run, load, and save programs - without ever leaving the system. It was still programming, though (as was COBOL). Visual Basic was released many years later, and looked very different from the original BASIC.
  • collyw 7y ago
    Wasn't the main reason for VB's success the fact that it had a really good GUI builder and that a version was integrated into Excel?
    • Turing_Machine 7y ago
      Yes, the VB GUI builder was excellent (as compared to the language itself, which was meh, IMO). Some people even used it to build GUIs for applications where the bulk of the code was written in another language. VBA was in all the Office applications... Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Access...
• rvense 7y ago
  I'm not really sure I'm seeing anything that isn't the logical continuation of the move from low-level languages to higher level languages, and from lots of bespoke software to frameworks and libraries. A big pile of Zapier gunk might be brittle, but I think tools like it are a natural progression in a society where everything is dependent on computers. To me it's part of "Everyone should learn to code".
• swalsh 7y ago
  I've spent a long time trying to build "No Code" solutions. Probably 3 different products, 3 different companies. But once, I tried something different. I pushed back, instead I proposed we build a domain specific language using Ruby. I already had some trust with my boss... and he was pretty convinced it was going to fail, he had zero faith these smart (but non-technical) users could successfully use it. But he was willing to let me fail. So we tried it, and really surprisingly, they caught on very quickly, and they were producing complex content within a week. "No Code" solutions are like asking your user to communicate using pictographs. It's possible, but language allows users to communicate in better detail faster. In school I learned how to write, I'm probably not anywhere close to writing a novel. I'm a terrible writer, but I can write an email. Frankly, that get's me pretty far.
  • pklee 7y ago
    That is really cool. How did you go about designing the language. Did you go for a full lexer and parser ? or it was more functional. Curious to understand how you built it.
    • swalsh 7y ago
      Ruby's super power is it's meta programming ability. So they were really just writing Ruby. If you google, I think there's a bunch of tutorials out there for creating a DSL in Ruby... but I learned from a book called "Metaprogramming Ruby"
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • Stratoscope 7y ago
        Thanks for the book recommendation, I am eager to read it. I looked on Amazon but there are only used paperbacks and no Kindle edition. But I saw from the cover that it was a Pragmatic Press book, so looked for it there and they have a no-DRM ebook of the second edition - for a lot less money than the used copies on Amazon! https://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr2/metaprogramming-ruby-2 https://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr2/metaprogramming-ruby-2
• reallydontask 7y ago
  Microsoft are pushing the concept of citizen developer like crazy with their Dynamics 365 platform and things like Flow, Logic Apps and PowerApps. Having worked on that space, I find the potential users (that are not developers) to be pretty limited, YMMV
• streetcat1 7y ago
  The no-code solution would probably come from machine learning, and not from automating logic-based programming.
• alxlaz 7y ago
  I was pretty young back then but I do remember a lot of these things being driving forces behind 4GL and 5GL languages. I played with a lot of these things because I was just getting into programming and I was still at the "syntax is hard, maybe what I need is a simpler language" phase... A lot of these things failed for reasons that are, I think, fundamentally unavoidable if your goal is to not learn anything and just do it: - Tools that emphasize (or function exclusively based on) configuration over over code are limited by things that you can configure. As soon as you stray beyond that, you not only have to code, but you have to code for a system that has a lot of implicit behaviour. That's a hellish experience if you're an inexperienced programmer. Figuring out why your code produces a result other than what you expected is hard enough. Figuring out why your code produces a result other than what you expected because there's a default configuration flag that alters its behaviour (or, worse, that alters the result after your code correctly computes it) is way more complicated. - Tracking changes in systems that emphasize (or function exclusively based on) configuration over code is insanely difficult, and reverting systems back to a specific state is pretty hard, too. This may be less of a problem today, in the age of containers, I guess. - Validating changes in such systems is even more difficult than that, because a lot of the logic is implicit and hidden from sight. If you have to make a change in a system you're not too familiar with, reading the code can give you an idea about what behaviour would be affected. If your change breaks something, reading the code can help you debug things. If there's no code to read, or you can't do it in the first place, and changing the header of a column just broke your reporting tool, you're going to spend a few fun evenings at the office poking it with a stick until it un-breaks. - Tools that emphasize integration of separate tools over coding result in systems that aren't very fun to maintain. Changes in the way components interface were a problem even in the early 00s, and they weren't on a rolling/continuous release schedule, weren't delivered "as a service", and "move fast and break things" was just called being sloppy. Integrating a dozen third-party modules today requires full-time maintenance, from someone who can definitely code. I do think that making it possible for end-users to automate their work is a direction worth pursuing, but this isn't the way to do it, and I think there's a wealth of lessons from two decades of failures to learn. IMHO, some broad directions worth pursuing would be: - A simpler and more stable development framework. Keeping up with JS and CSS frameworks (many of which exist precisely because pure JS and CSS are pretty painful to use if you want to develop a desktop-like application) is hard even for people who use them professionally. There's no way you can ask business people to keep up with that. A more stable framework, that hides the fact that browsers were never meant for application development well enough (even if that means less flexibility) could go a long way towards making things easier. - Better DSL integration in business tools. A lot of the business logic is written in the same language as, and embedded in, the overall application logic. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Template engines are sufficiently advanced today that you can do a lot with them, and I've seen people without much programming knowledge being able to use them productively. - Oh and if we're being honest: better code quality where code really can't be eschewed. Virtually every business app I've seen in the last ten years is the same story: a user needs a change, they can articulate it perfectly well, they can describe the logic in pretty good details, sometimes they can even give you an Excel sheet that implements it so that you can see a few examples. The only reason why they can't make the change themselves is that sorting a table by date instead of name doesn't involve replacing SORT_BY_DATE with SORT_BY_NAME in a template, it involves changing half a dozen SQL queries, two hardcoded parameters in some JS function calls, and introduces a subtle bug because passing SORT_BY_DATE in that function call actually modifies the table in place, which is a global variable, and that table is then reused by another function which assumes it's sorted by name.
• mellosouls 7y ago
  This reminds me of Gartner's "Citizen Developer" line used to sell expensive software to gullible managers. I note there is - strangely - no corresponding "Citizen Management Consultant" role. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/citizen-developer https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/c...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ptah 7y ago
  > software developers are expensive in most businesses the business experts are more expensive. wasting their time with building systems can be costly
• throwaway55554 7y ago
  > Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. Last couple of years? I'm sorry, how long have you been in the industry because the industry has talked about that forever.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• cm2012 7y ago
  As a marketer, I always look for no code solutions first. API integrations? Use Zapier. Email form integration? Sumo or similar. Triggers? Google tag manager. Etc. The reason being that the dev team at any company never has time for new projects.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    So, instead of "learning a new language", they're "configuring a new integration"? Guess how much these differ...spoiler: two marketing labels for the same thing.
    • cm2012 7y ago
      I can train one of my juniors in how zapier works in an afternoon. Teaching them (or myself) a programming language would take years and be more error prone.
      • Piskvorrr 7y ago
        Okay, now that makes sense. I have originally understood it as "...and the dev team also gets to manage the no-code thing."
      • ebiester 7y ago
        I can teach IF, FOR, and the basics of python in a week. I can teach ruby in about the same. For what they are going to need for a low code solution, that's enough. You don't need to teach all of programming - only a subset that would be covered in a low/no code solution. If you don't believe this, look at how many non-CS professionals have learned VBA as their excel-fu reached a limit. Even if it's not clean to start, the natural human curiosity starts to take over. One of the better programmers I ever knew had a high school education and was working in an airplane maintenance facility when he was frustrated with the tools he had and just started learning VBA on his own.
        • Dirlewanger 7y ago
          Doesn't matter if teaching fundamentals only takes "a week" -- that can't be afforded when you need a tool right now.
• hyperpallium 7y ago
  "The last one" avoided the need to code back in 81 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) and no one has coded since. But abstractions and declarative languages have their place. Consider relational algebra and SQL, and all the little declarative languages within other languages, like regular expressions, printf/scanf format strings, even char escape sequences. But these require a lot of thought and talent to up with, and to design (e.g. codd didn't design SQL). Whereas TFA is talking about whole languages, and designed ad hoc.
• nslindtner 7y ago
  The quote that sticks with me is "New Blocks means new builders". I'm pretty sure this new 'movement' will gain a lot of steam. Probally mostly because of the 'no developer'-dreams. But the most value I find, is when working with very structured people - who understand data AND LOGIC - but doesn't know how to code. They do not have to write a spec, but can instead make a working prototype pretty quickly. I actually think the biggest change from earlier on, is that the 'No-Code' doesn't seems to be a dead-end. As it has been earlier. If you grow out of the No-Code tools, it possible to replace parts of the No-Code expirience using microservices and serverless.
• Piskvorrr 7y ago
  TL;DR: it all boils down to reinventing Common LISP.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  I'm super skeptical about anything that claims to be 'no code'. That said, I had an in depth look at Mendix and I have to say I'm impressed.
  • rchaud 7y ago
    It depends on the use case. For processes that are stable and where most edge cases have been solved, no-code is ideal. Take Salesforce for example. You can build a number of mini-applications, like say a university application tracking system, simply by throwing together built-in components in SF.
• davidpolberger 7y ago
  No-node app builders are certainly no panacea, and I say that as a co-founder of an app builder (Calcapp). However, if your requirements fall into a domain that is common enough that no-code tools exist, people who don't consider themselves developers can often get a solution in place remarkably quickly. Database apps (CRUD) appear to be the target of most no-code products -- define your tables, build your user interface, bind fields to columns and you're good to go. Of course, a real pitfall is that you often bump into the limitations of your chosen platform after having completed 80 percent of the work, and then you're either stuck or need to devise elaborate workarounds. We see many app builders that truly use no code in the traditional sense. The simpler of these tools essentially only allow users to wire together pre-fabricated building blocks, like content screens, chat rooms and the like. More powerful app builders allow logic to be described using visual flow charts. We have taken the approach of trying to cater to spreadsheet users, and put formulas at the front and center of everything. (Much like Microsoft PowerApps, in fact, though Calcapp precedes it.) Formulas enable complex ideas to be expressed. Ultimately, we put our faith in users having an easier time learning a reactive, functional programming language than they would have learning a traditional, imperative programming language. Fundamentally, the reactive model enables users to express relationships between entities without having to concern themselves with ordering. Supporting only pure functions, with no side-effects, means that we can cache results aggressively, much like a spreadsheet. There are limits to this approach, though. If you want users to press a button and have different things happen depending on a condition, how would you approach this? Currently, you can't, at least not with Calcapp. Taking actions in response to an event being fired is, per definition, something that requires an imperative approach. With some trepidation, we're working on enabling formulas to be "run," but only in response to events being fired. These formulas would have access to non-pure functions (changing global state) and even an assignment operator (as well as semicolons, so that multiple statements can be executed). We will likely call them "action formulas." The challenge is that all this should feel familiar and logical to an Excel user. For instance, we're introducing anonymous functions (lambdas), which can run asynchronously in response to, say, a user pressing a button in a message dialog, but lambda parameters will have default names, meaning that using "arrow syntax" (like in Java and ES6) to name parameters will be optional. We're trying hard not to introduce syntax that would look strange to an Excel user. I think it's reasonable to refer to app builders supporting spreadsheet-like formulas as "no-code tools." However, what about app builders supporting imperative programming, using a text syntax? We're well aware that we could introduce functions like WHILE, DO and FOREACH that together with lambdas would turn Calcapp into a full (Turing-complete), imperative programming language. Can such a tool still be considered to be a no-code tool? Probably not. I suppose that's why there's an additional moniker: low-code.
• statictype 7y ago
  This rings very true. We sell an integration platform-as-a-service[1] and it offers a 'low code' visual environment to stitch together integrations. But from pretty much the start, we built-in support to drop down to Javascript to build logic and we think we hit a sweet spot there. You can visually string together most components but drop in a bit of script to concisely define some hairy transformation or complex logic. These kinds of low code environment are great for doing customizations or enhancements or integrating many things together. It's very much not an optimal solution for building entire applications or software solutions. There's also the issue of tooling. There's a huge amount of infrastructure built around maintaining large application code bases (version control, merging, diffing). If you want to build large pieces of software in a no-code environment you still need all of those tools - except they don't exist and are non-standard. [1] https://lucyinthesky.io https://lucyinthesky.io
  • sytringy05 7y ago
    +1,000,000 As the article points out, the problem with these is they are sold as a silver bullet and companies who don't know any better will spend millions building putting a lot of code in the script nodes on their "low code" platform. Code that can't be unit tested properly, that has at best some really crappy tools for automation and limitations that drive everybody crazy (ie getting logs into es/splunk or whatever - syslog UDP over the internet ftw!) You are clearly a responsible vendor, I wish the others I deal would be honest with their customers about what the low codes do well vs what they dont
• loh 7y ago
  I agree with the author for the most part. An exception to this rule is that in terms of front-end (or end-to-end) testing, if an application is deterministic, you most certainly don't need to write any code to create tests for it. You can record actions and snapshots and replay the actions and compare snapshots. There can often be more to it than that (like filtering dynamic elements/attributes and pattern matching), but for the most part, this approach works quite well.
• gerbilly 7y ago
  What makes programming difficult isn't the syntax, it's the need to define the problem in an completely unambiguous and consistent manner.
  • mark-r 7y ago
    You forgot a couple of things. You need to define the problem in a way that's complete (no missing corner cases) and be able to debug it when it goes wrong.
    • gerbilly 7y ago
      Good points. I think it's interesting to compare source code and legal documents. A similar need for precision, internal consistency, lack of loopholes is needed when drafting a legal contract or legislation. This is all done in natural language, but it doesn't make it magically easier.
      • mark-r 7y ago
        I often am thankful that I work with software and not contracts. Could you imagine writing software where the instructions are not guaranteed to work the same each time, and there is no way to test before going into production?
• TrackerFF 7y ago
  The closest I've been to "no code" is using LabVIEW, Function blocks diagrams in PLCs, and more recently Node-RED. I've seen engineers (with self-professed terrible programming skills) build working things with those tools - and yes, there's some code here and there. But those have been for rather specialized and smaller tasks...I can only imagine what a HUGE LabVIEW project would look like.
• TruffleLabs 7y ago
  Change control is always a people problem re: “change control” becomes a software problem rather than a people problem. Changes are made by people and the changes affect people. Software can help track, control, sustain. But the actual change start with people.
• segmondy 7y ago
  The "No Code" movement is not a delusion. Most of us in tech are very ego driven and don't think this will happen, the majority is not in tech and want this to happen. It will happen.
  • busterarm 7y ago
    I feel like everyone misunderstood what the "No Code" movement is supposed to be about. It's "No Code is the Best Code". The idea is that the code you should be writing should be things that are the core of what your business does. Those things should be sufficiently hard to replicate. Everything else should be a commoditized product or open source infrastructure that you deploy. This way you avoid time reinventing the wheel or, much more importantly, making your product something that's easy to commoditize! I've worked at companies with hundreds of complex Java microservices that essentially replicate built-in functionality provided by NGINX, HAProxy, etc. Literally for no other reason that the people making the decisions know how to write code, but they don't know how to productionize and configure NGINX or HAProxy. These companies are more than happy to waste hundreds and thousands of man-hours building and maintaining this code that isn't their product versus hiring more competent ops folks to stand up infrastructure or train developers on cross-functional skills. When the size of your engineering org starts climbing into the hundreds and thousands, NIH Syndrome kicks into high gear. Heck, I'd actually say it starts around 30.
  • UK-Al05 7y ago
    I don't mind it happening. Just most of these tools are rehashes of stuff that happened in the 90's and still have the same problems. Programming has been an evolution higher and higher abstractions. It's not different. We will probably move to a higher abstraction, but it will probably something like describing the problem with tests, and the computer automatically writing something that passes these tests. You still need these skills. You will just accomplish more in less time.
• heinrich5991 7y ago
  The shown C code has a buffer overflow vulnerability: #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> char *add_domain_name(char *source) { const size_t size = 1024; char *dest = malloc(size+1); strncpy(dest, source, size); strncat(dest, "@example.com", size); return dest; } `strncat` takes as a third parameter the maximum length of the appended string. strncat(dest, "@example.com", size - strlen(dest)); would be correct.
  • gengkev 7y ago
    This isn't even quite right, since the first argument of strncat needs to be a null-terminated string, and strncpy may not null-terminate. I would honestly just give up and write size_t len = strlen(source); char *dest = malloc(len + sizeof("@example.com")-1 + 1); strcpy(dest, source); strcpy(dest + len, "@example.com");
• thrower123 7y ago
  I've seen this so many times - rather than just write code to do something, wouldn't it be grand if the users could plug their code in with some scripting language or twiddle some configuration and poof! magic! new features just happen! It's one of those things that looks grand on the whiteboard and fantastic on the slide deck, but holy fucking christ when it comes down to implementing it and moreover, having to support it forever after, the pain spirals. Users can't actually implement their plugins, so you end up writing them for them, in a gimped DSL or scripting language, and all the initial choices that were made become ossified, because you then can't ever risk breaking some potential plugin code out there that depends on the API.
• satyrnein 7y ago
  While everyone is right that a "no code" platform cannot replace all developers, if you take away the extreme framing, there is an interesting trend occurring. These days, business power users can accomplish a lot with tools like Excel (this one was always true), Google Forms, Salesforce, Airtable, Looker, and so on. People can define entities, custom fields, workflows, reports... things that used to be feature requests for developers. Of course, many developers have had the experience of having to come in and deal with some insane Excel spreadsheets, but many of us have also been called into deal with crazy legacy systems built by professional developers. That itself is not an indictment. As these tools grow, presenting new and lower cost ways of getting a certain class of activities done, I think we would be well served to figure out how to play nicely with these tools. (It's not like we want to spend our time building custom CRUD apps anyway.)
• kaikoenig 7y ago
  I think no code has its place. I view that as a step/experiment towards a common "language/notation" to describe how a business interacts with its surroundings that is not Java or the likes. Will be really interesting to see where this all leads or if it blows over. BTW - of course we are also build such a thing at Bitspark - https://bitspark.de/slang/ https://bitspark.de/slang/ or https://github.com/bitspark/slang https://github.com/bitspark/slang
• ivan_ah 7y ago
  > “No Code” systems are extremely good for putting together proofs-of-concept which can demonstrate the value of moving forward with development. Another positive aspect is the ability to teach junior coders. One of the coolest things on that front is MIT App Inventor https://appinventor.mit.edu/ https://appinventor.mit.edu/ — a webapp for creating Android apps using Blockly-style blocks, see screenshot here here https://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/designer-blocks#blocks https://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/designer-blocks#blocks I was super surprised to see middle-school kids building real .apk and running on their phone.
• Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  There's no such thing as "no code". There's just interfaces which are more-or-less capable, and more-or-less intuitive. Any time you define a set of instructions for a computer to execute, you are creating code. We use Scratch at my Girls Who Code club. It requires students to consider branching paths, and data types, and asynchronous execution. It does not require the students to type, but thank god for that, because they're 9 years old and type at approximately 1 words per minute. Scratch is still code just like Java, and Lego Mindstorm's EV3, and Automator, and IFTTT. Not all of these systems are Turing complete, and each one contains different restrictions in an attempt to stop users from shooting themselves in the foot: Java doesn't have manual memory management, Automator doesn't have conditionals, and IFTTT is limited to a single trigger and action. But there're still code. Users of these tools need to carefully consider input and edge cases, and test and iterate to see if the code is doing what they intended. IMO, the primary reason "professional programmers" type their code is because once you know what to type, keyboards are fundamentally faster than mice. That's also why Excel power users frequently rely almost entirely on keyboard shortcuts, and why the command line for an experienced user is often faster than a GUI. --- Edit: BTW, for the same reason that HTML isn't a programming language, I don't consider most "website builders" to be code, even though I do consider IFTTT to be code. Code in this context means creating instructions for a computer to follow. Laying out elements on a page (which then adapt to different screen sizes based on predefined behavior) is just that, laying out elements. I don't know about you, but I can feel myself entering a "coding mindset" when I load up IFTTT—it's simpler than writing Javascript to be sure, but it's the same type of brain muscle, and there's no avoiding it.
  • satyrnein 7y ago
    This made me wonder: which side would other activities fall on, if event handling was the defining characteristic of "code"? Not code - Excel, SQL, HTML, CSS Code - Email inbox rules, IFTTT. Alarm clock?
    • jimbokun 7y ago
      > Not code - Excel, SQL, HTML, CSS > Code - Email inbox rules, IFTTT. Alarm clock? All of those are code, just varying in their level of Turing-completeness.
• agent86 7y ago
  As someone who has been managing Low Code/No Code on a large scale for a major enterprise from before this became buzzword soup, I can categorically state that the benefits are real. HN isn't the intended market here, and that disconnect is shown in the currently leading comment thread which is talking about DevOps deployment. DevOps is way beyond what this space currently targets and is working to achieve. To be crystal clear, Low Code/No Code is not going to replace a company's custom developed application that drives their core business. It isn't even going to replace the need for custom application development throughout an enterprise. This is an augmentative technology stack intended for a different audience. What it does do is empower non-IT employees to become what the industry likes to call "Citizen Developers". Think more Excel/Access less <insert favorite language/framework here>. Where this technology currently shines brightest is at the lowest levels of work. Every enterprise has pockets where work is getting done from Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, email chains, SharePoint/Office documents and worse. Essentially work that could be done easier and better with an application, but where the current enterprise cost, developer availability, political/agility issues, or simple knowledge that the problem exists prevents that application from being created. The best products in this space allow IT to setup a space where non-IT staff can create applications within the confines of the environment to address these problems. For example, a department can go in on their own and replace a shared spreadsheet that is locked all the time from coconcurrent use with something that is truly multi-user. On top of that, they get to enhance their process and improve productivity by having it generate emails to someone when work is needed, or automatically create new tasks when certain statuses are encountered, and other similar things associated with "modern" technology. They do all of this on their own without needing formal IT development resources. There are obvious benefits to an enterprise here - like replacing multiple unsupported/bespoke solutions with a single known and supported platform - but there are multiple side bonuses as well. For an example of one, the best products in this space have great APIs. The staff making/managing these applications may not even know they exist, and certainly can't write against them, but now IT has a standardized way to get this data somewhere else when needed. Data driven organizations can use this to drive what I call "Small Data", which is applying Big Data practices/analytics to low level work product to improve processes. The next major development in this space will be low code/no code integrations. When you're talking about these low levels of work, they are generally mid-process actors. Work comes in, gets done, and is handed to the next in line. That data largely gets to these teams from some kind of export process in the upstream system - CSV dump, daily email, etc. - and then needs to get fed back up via a similar or worse method. You can use the aforementioned API to fix this, but that again requires developer resources. This may be doable to for interacting with a core upstream system but it isn't always available when you have two bottom level processes looking to communicate. The ability for "Citizen Developers" to be able to obtain the data they need from an upstream process, complete the work on it inside their application, and then return the results back to the upstream process or next process in line without having to write code or otherwise manually intervene will further drive productivity and usefulness in this space.
• richieb 7y ago
  As I recall, Assembler was the first "no-code" tool. After all you could get rid of all those pesky programmers who knew all the number codes for instructions. Anyone could write "ADD R, R2". See!
• tomerbd 7y ago
  anyone tried bubble?
• Animats 7y ago
  I miss the days when you could create a web site without coding. Remember Dreamweaver?
• chrisweekly 7y ago
  Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.
  • sgift 7y ago
    Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.
    • badsectoracula 7y ago
      Well, but if all you cared about was the design and not the code, then those tools were very useful. Sometimes i use Adobe PageMill (which is essentially a rich text editor ala WordPad that saves in HTML and has a sidebar with a file browser) to create very simple sites (e.g. [0]). I do not really care about what the code looks like since i'm not going to edit it by hand anyway (though FWIW i find it very readable). Many years ago i worked at a company where i had to edit PHP files edited in DreamWeaver by someone who had no idea about PHP, programming or even HTML (they'd design and write the text for the pages, i'd supply some code). The only issue i remember having was a couple of times making DreamWeaver unable to open the page, but that was fixed quickly. Honestly personally i'm a big fan of WYSIWYG applications and i really see it as a big step backwards how many things nowadays rely on (often several) preprocessing steps of codes like Markdown, RST or adhoc syntaxes. I understand that it is much simpler and easier to implement this way and i do it myself too, but i do not pretend that this is somehow easier for the end user or it has better usability (and especially grinds my gears when someone tries to convince me otherwise by using edge cases that only happen at 0.1% of the time, if at all, when actually writing/editing the content is what you'd do 99.9% of the time). [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/
    • hinkley 7y ago
      My first job involved an element of hand-validating third party HTML and really, those two tools germinated a seed of hatred for generated code that grew and flourished unabated until the first time I looked at the output from an SCSS file. If not for Less and Sass, I might have gone to my retirement never having liked a single code generator. Because they all wrote the most atrociously wrongheaded code from perfectly reasonable user inputs. (By one definition, compilers generate machine code, but those did not fall under my umbrella definition of code generator)
• sequoia 7y ago
  I was once at a company (X) that acquired another company (Y), and Y's main product was a graphical programming tool. Y advertised that their tool could speed application development up 10x. My (nontechnical) manager asked me "why don't you use Y's tool to build the project you're currently working on?" I answered with the following metaphor: Imagine you have to pick a bike to go on a trip. You're travelling on a well paved road through the woods. If you take a light & narrow wheeled racing bike, you'll travel much much faster than if you ride a knobbly wheeled mountain bike with suspension, as long as you stay on the road. As soon as you need to go off the road and cut a new path, you are going to wish you had that mountain bike, and the road bike is actually going to make you go much slower or just stop altogether. So does the "speed bike"/advanced framework make you go faster? Yes, as long as you stay on the road (i.e. constrain your requirements to their feature set). The moment you need to "go off-road" (i.e. do something the framework doesn't do), such tools actually make it difficult or impossible to make progress. This is why, for a complex applications (most commercial software), I prefer the mountain bike. Yes, it's slower on certain paths, but when we need to "go off-road" I don't slow to a stop.
  • smhenderson 7y ago
    Reminds me of something Bruce McKinney said about Visual Basic when I was much younger and beginning to learn about computers in general, I'm paraphrasing here but the gist was "Visual Basic makes 95% of your task easy and the other 5% impossible". Of course Bruce is a hard core programmer so he went on to show you how to do the 5% in VB using some crazy hacks or, better, do it in C/C++ using COM and glue it onto your VB code using the common MS interface of the day (pre .Net that is). I've forgotten more of it then I remember but I do remember really enjoying reading anything Bruce wrote! http://www.vb.mvps.org/hardweb/hardbook.htm http://www.vb.mvps.org/hardweb/hardbook.htm
    • tabtab 7y ago
      That's often the trade-off of any high-level tool or library. It will make a big chunk of related tasks easier, but won't be able to handle a small subset. Hopefully there are ways to work around the limits.
• npollock 7y ago
  "No code" does not equal "no programming". For me, programming is 90% about how I structure/organize a process, 10% is the expression of said process through code.
• uberdru 7y ago
  And using our new graphical "workbench", your business users will be able to integrate applications without placing any burden on your development teams. Sign here. . .
• slumdev 7y ago
  Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the new "No Code". And it will fail the same way every other "No Code" fad has failed over the years, no matter how successfully McKinsey sells it for the next few years. It will never completely disappear, but there is no future where a BA with an overhyped macro suite replaces the whole of software engineering.
  • jordanbeiber 7y ago
    RPA just seems crazy... I mean, I see the golden shimmer, but why do so many enterprises refuse to actually, you know, solve the problem? I have, btw, just finished reading “the phoenix project”. Brilliant book! Having lived through pretty much that story a couple of times, the solution is just that simple. Not easy, but simple. Been around a while, at several big companies, I know most of them will do RPA (they are of course the ones having a blockchain project plodding along), but only a few will go down the “software company” route. It’s kind of tragic.
    • blowski 7y ago
      Because they can’t go straight from A to B, because there are so many audited processes that are tightly coupled to A. So they replace A with B one step at a time, and keep A in sync with B using RPA. When the whole of A is replaced, you turn it off along with the RPA. The problem comes when RPA stops being a short-term tactic, and starts being a long-term cottage industry. Unfortunately, RPA vendors have a vested interest in keeping A around as long as possible in order to maintain the necessity of their solution.
      • jordanbeiber 7y ago
        Well, they can’t because they usually don’t really try. Most likely they have outsourced years ago and lost a lot of competency along the way. They have invested heavily on in really crappy software and solving this with something like RPA seems to me like introducing a ginormous footgun/perpetual roadblock. That RPA is not going anywhere soon... Or will it be replaced by the billion dollar, just a bit late, “phoenix project”? The ONE platform that promises speed and agility? That one? :)
• rsclient 7y ago
  The add_domain_name code has another buffer overflow problem const size_t size = 1024; char *dest = malloc(size+1); strncpy(dest, source, size); strncat(dest, "@example.com", size); return dest; The first strncpy will not append a NUL character when strlen(source) is exactly equal to size; the rules for strncpy and NUL termination are just about useless outside of a few specialty cases. (heinrich5991 found a seperate problem with the strncat). IMHO, this helps prove the point about levels of abstraction. The only reason that we argue over the idea that higher level == better is that we're programmers, and we argue over everything :-)
  • Accujack 7y ago
    I have a hard time taking the author seriously if he confuses low level vs. high level languages for primitive vs. advanced in language design.
• markmiro 7y ago
  I like to think of the no-code stuff like this: - People who are into this stuff know there's something to it, but as a movement, we don't know exactly what it is. - My personal feeling is that any no-code tool should be useful enough that I would use it. I want some no-code to make me feel for my career a bit. - The "threat", I think, is very real. For example, whenever I see myself following a set of rules to write software and not thinking, I start to wonder if some abstraction is lurking in there. Maybe the solution is a programming library, but increasingly, I think there's opportunity for this stuff to be more visual. Why visual? - UI programming is necessarily visual, and a visual tool for building interfaces makes sense - Tools around managing software development. GitHub is IMO a no-code tool. VSCode is. Many IDEs are. Why not visual? Algorithms and business logic. Like the author, I'm unconvinced that flow diagrams will provide enough flexibility to be useful for all but the simplest cases. I guess my feelings aren't that different from the author's but I think the difference is I'm optimistic that the movement will be generative.
  • jimbokun 7y ago
    I don't think your career is any danger from better tools. (At least short of full-AI, which would put every career in danger.) All kinds of amazing visual interface building tools have been created, that are very easy to use, easy to teach, easy to get started, and are very powerful. I'm still not sure that a better UI development tool than Hypercard has been invented yet. So why do professional programmers still exist? Because most people don't want to do even that level of software development. Either they find it beneath them, find it boring, get frustrated when they want to do something that stretches the tool's capabilities, don't want to be responsible for fixing bugs and maintenance, etc. etc. etc. It's not that most professionals are not smart enough to be programmers. It's that they dislike it enough to pay someone else to do it for them, or would just rather focus their time doing other things they enjoy more or believe to provide more value.
    • scroot 7y ago
      > So why do professional programmers still exist? Because most people don't want to do even that level of software development. Either they find it beneath them, find it boring, get frustrated when they want to do something that stretches the tool's capabilities, don't want to be responsible for fixing bugs and maintenance, etc. etc. etc. I'm not so sure about this. Hypercard was extremely popular among non-programmers in its heyday. It is not their fault that Apple, who had no idea what to really do with the software, let it die on the vine. Computer companies have inclucated a computing culture that places a sharp perceptual divide between users and programmers, leaving little room for anything in between. My belief is that this has happened for wider structural/economic reasons (contemporary emphasis on consumerism, short term thinking, etc) rather than any general distaste for "real computing" among regular people. If we do not provide regular people with "Hypercard-like things" and instead give them shrinkwrapped solutions, we will of course have the perception that they have no interest in what we call -- for lack of a better term -- end user programming.
• yters 7y ago
  Why does the common non programmer need a visual UI? Why so allergic to typing text? The rest of the average office worker's job takes place through the traditional CLI known as English (or other language).
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Discoverability is vastly superior in visual interfaces.
• bitwize 7y ago
  I keep saying it. Whatever non-code representation you may have for your logic -- dataflow diagrams, interpretive dance, Minecraft redstone, whatever -- you need to make it unambiguous enough that a machine can act on it in a well-defined way, and once you do that what you have is isomorphic to a construct in some textual programming language. And lines of text are going to be easier to input, edit, and maintain than your chosen representation, barring some major UI revolution.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• rglover 7y ago
  For what it's worth, tools like Webflow (and their CMS feature) are incredibly well-done. From a front-end development perspective, no code is legitimate and practical today. From a back-end or business-logic perspective, no code is more difficult because a lot of it is bespoke (except for things like generating a PDF from HTML). It's not a binary "killer," but it's certainly a smart thing to play with as a programmer. I've saved a ton of time on things like marketing websites and CMS-level work using Webflow. With time and iteration, I'd imagine some pretty neat and powerful stuff will appear. Read: don't be naive/stubborn; give it a try.
• mootzville 7y ago
  "no code" will work when the halting problem is solved...
• AmericanChopper 7y ago
  I think we’ve already been moving closer and closer to “no code” simply through the evolution of programming languages and tools, much more than we have through the advancement of specific “no code” frameworks. Programming languages are becoming higher and higher level. Abstracting more and more boilerplate and plumbing. Then you have frameworks specifically designed to fill that role, and package repositories, further reducing the amount of code you have to write. The outcomes are that: 1) Your source code has a much higher ratio of business logic to everything else 2) Your business logic is expressed in less lines of code, and in ways that are increasingly becoming more similar to their natural language representation We haven’t reached “no code”, but we are currently at “much less code”, and a lot of projects can be achieved with “very little code at all”.
• rchaud 7y ago
  I think those with a programming background take terms like "no code" far too literally. For those who've worked in finance IT, you may know of staff who've build incredibly elaborate models in Excel, and then have come to you when they need something that can't be done in Excel. "No code platforms" will likely work the same way. These platforms provide just enough interactive/dynamic functionality for non-programmers to build a decent prototype of what they're trying to create. They can then take this to their dev team (if they have one) and ask for refinements. Even if the end result requires a full rebuild, I'd wager the devs would be happier because they wouldn't waste time building something based on vague specifications communicated by a non-technical staff member. They'd have a prototype to work off of, and can ask clarifying questions that will be easier for the stakeholder to answer because they can see where the devs are coming from, instead of simply speaking in abstractions about something that doesn't yet exist.
  • flarg 7y ago
    I have spent 5 years on and off in the no code space and IMHO you're almost spot on. Almost all standard enterprise platforms are non complex and can be delivered in no code solutions, requiring maybe 5pc as real code. Failing to acknowledge this is why IT organisations in large enterprises are typically sidelined by shadow IT teams, who often deliver great solutions in Excel and Oracle Apex.
    • delusional 7y ago
      I've spent 2 years in a fairly large bank, and I heavily disagree. We have tons of procedures and edge cases that are subtlely unique. Our problem is purely one of speed. When there's 3 quarters and 5 org layers between you and the developer, you are much more likely to just grab a tool you have access to and get to work.
    • bcrosby95 7y ago
      "Shadow IT" teams are great at delivering solutions quickly because their clients tends to be themselves. When you're writing solutions for your own problems you're cutting out multiple communication layers which will reduce the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. Also by not making it an "official" project you can cut through lots of red tape and requirements not related to the problem at hand.
• cuhpajo 7y ago
  Everyone seems to want to make an analogy for why no-code tools are bad, or will end badly. But I've watched countless numbers of individuals start & build full web apps, websites, mobile apps, and more - all without code. No-code tools are viable to use to build a product or business, and they're here to stay. They're not here to "take dev jobs", but they are here to empower the 99.5% of people that don't know how to code. Imagine what features more advanced no-code tool platforms like Webflow.com & Bubble.io will have in 5 years. While y'all discuss pros/cons, we'll be busy building.
• LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  The whole of automation is riddled with this. Its gui programmable, easy to learn, no programmers necessary. Watch how i build this and that, with 3 easy steps. Its marketed to, this is difficult to translate "gebrannte kinder" (children who have touched a hot stove), sales people and ceos. For them software is this mystery field, that sucks in money and seemingly competent people, and spits out failures, projects that dont complete or dont complete on time. So they dream of a world, where they wouldnt depend on that field. And buy systems with heavy incoded restrictions, and often even worser - tech debt and architectural restrictions build beneath the drag and drop programable surface. Where they get burned again. So there is a constant back and forth towards this tools. They are marketing gimmicks, lacking the power to execute more complex software, for which they are usually not bought, but into which the project inevitable grows.
• anigbrowl 7y ago
  At the heart of the issue is the concept that “computer programming” - which is to say, writing code - is a constraint on the development of software. That there is some “higher level” on which people can operate, where development is much simpler but the end results in some way the same. Specifically, the idea of writing business logic in text form according to the syntax of a technical programming language is anathema. To make an analogy: it’s a little bit like saying all software developers are like car mechanics, who get into the guts of an engine. But most people just need to be able to drive the car, and a simpler interface can be put on top of the machine (a steering wheel and some pedals). This is a bad, bad analogy. There is a higher level on which people can and do operate, and it's called 'drawing flowcharts'. The correct analogy for the case of a car is not abstracting the work of car mechanics to be more like a car dashboard, but making it easier to view car schematics as opposed to textual descriptions that convey the same information but have to be processed in linear rather than holistic fashion. To be sure, there are many 'build without code' tools available that over-simplify or promise that to never expose the user to any complexity, and that is indeed a delusion at best and a lie at worst. But the idea that complexity can only be effectively represented in textual form by elaborate syntax is equally absurd; it's simply a product of what technology was practical at the time. It's not better, as such; it's just what he have a lot of. Consider assembly language. I love it; it is so basic that it takes me back to the delight of understanding Towers of Hanoi type problems and I get a kick of out of reverse-engineering things in a debugger. But writing any kind of large project in assembler is not a good idea if you want anyone else to get involved, because it's not very accessible - hence the popularity of high level languages. But high level languages are in many ways a product of keyboard input and monitors as assembler was a product of punch cards and blinkenlights. They're great, but they're also hard to read - and so as time has gone by things like syntax highlighting and autocompletion have become standard in editors. You could learn to code without any syntax highlighting; it didn't exist when I started. You could learn to just read everything in assembler. But once you have a useful tool available, demanding that people refrain from using it because it makes things too easy is just expressing a sort of anxiety about the existence of shortcuts that were not available to you, and the resulting ability of others to catch up to you in less time than it took you to learn. So it is with the 'no code' trend. People who spent a long time learning to code have developed very valuable engineering skills, but that doesn't make the more high-level component-assembly approach of no-coders invalid. The no-code people want to focus on domain problems (which they often understand very, very well) and not get caught up on the minutiae of language syntax; they're comfortable with the fact that someone else has been able to automate that in such a way that the computer does most of the work. Fighting this trend is like getting hung up on the inadequacies of Lego - all that blockiness, the general inefficiency, and path-dependency problems of building things out of lego rather than making them from scratch - while overlooking the fact that it's so easy that kids can do it and that it's a fantastic way to quickly prototype any sort of toy you want. In the first [flowchart] example, I need to know how the visual environment works. In the second, I need to know a language and a development environment. But both of those are skills that are easily acquired. No! one of these things is not like the other. It's waaay easier to understand flowcharts than it is to acquire all that syntactical and semantic knowledge. This isn't to deny the utility of text for specificity, but to point out that it only seems equivalently easy because the author already learned to write code and has not yet learned visual programming in depth. I encourage people who doubt this to spend some time building actual electronic circuits. After all, programming is just high level circuit design, so it should be easy, right? And if you're already good at electronics, why not just get into making your own components? After all, making electronic components like capacitors and resistors is just high level material science, right? Real programming is about pulling stuff straight off the periodic table and just working out the math, right? Of course it isn't, circuit design is its own discipline in which you spend a great deal of time wresting with (or exploiting) the fuzziness and quirks of electrical current flow instead of being able to take exactitude and precision for granted, and so on down. Conversely, the path forward for established coders in an increasingly modular world is exploiting their acquired skills of extreme precision and efficiency to make better modules that do things by magic and finally fulfil the promise of libraries to provide collections of functions that Just Work and do so reliably and speedily enough that they don't need to be rewritten over and over and it doesn't matter what language paradigm the downstream user has in mind. In the article's example, all the downstream user cares about is whether the email validator is RFC5321/2 compatible and what speed throughput it has. It shouldn't matter how it was made, the same way it doesn't matter to an electronics hobbyist precisely how a 555 timer works* and it doesn't matter to a low-level circuit designer how it gets manufactured. * although when you do start caring about how a 555 timer works, this is the most fun way to explore it: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1526?gclid=CjwKCAiAx_DwBRAfEiwA3vwZYsrg7fyuqAmhQniEp7m5Gj_jvwuSUMd-ce9dRAh0cSGuPPivgMfVzhoC7h0QAvD_BwE https://www.adafruit.com/product/1526?gclid=CjwKCAiAx_DwBRAf...
• adamsea 7y ago
  Well, you could argue that _all_ software applications -- web browsers, word processors, etc, are highly abstracted instances of graphical domain-specific programming languages. I actually think this is a useful way to think about things. We _all_ are computer programmers - every single user. We just operate at different levels of abstraction, and use different tools or languages to program the machine. So then, rather than "No Code" vs "Code", it becomes "What is the cost of a higher-level abstraction" vs "What is the cost/benefit of a lower-level abstraction". And if it makes sense to name one level of abstraction "code", and a level above that "not code", then, so be it. [EDIT: I think some useful examples are Sketch, Unity, Pro Tools, Photoshop, etc. Graphical interfaces for users to perform complex operations with a high level of abstraction. I guess I am arguing for, strictly speaking, considering all software user interfaces as highly abstracted DSL's.]
• honkycat 7y ago
  My response to "No Code" solutions: If there was a faster and easier way to develop software, we would be doing it. We are already using the easiest to understand tools we can find to develop the best software possible. There is no secret programmer cabal where we are holding hostage the REAL tools we use to develop software, and we keep them secret and hidden while we fuck around every day. For someone to develop a "no-code" solution that fits the huge variety of tasks developers are doing every day, they would be a genius in the same vein as Turing. They would be billionaires.
  • coffee 7y ago
    > If there was a faster and easier way to develop software, we would be doing it. We are already using the easiest to understand tools we can find to develop the best software possible. Not really. As we evolve software development, historically, we've done this through adding new layers of abstraction. Assembly --> C --> Interpreted Code (Java, Ruby, etc...) Why isn't the next layer of abstraction simply what is being termed as "No Code" today?
    • Bartweiss 7y ago
      > Why isn't the next layer of abstraction simply what is being termed as "No Code" today? Cynically? Because people were also selling "no code" ten years ago, or even further back. I know that sort of inductive argument doesn't actually work. We went through a dozen nonsense models of infections, but germ theory was actually correct in the end. AI has seen frauds and baseless hype since the mechanical Turk, but there still came a point when computers won at chess and Jeopardy. But it's a pretty good warning sign. The gradual progression of abstractions still caps out somewhere around Python and Rails. We have drag-and-drop website makers, and visual tools for "plumbing" ML flows backed by pandas, or engineering calculations backed by Matlab. They mostly work, and people who know the underlying tools sometimes use them for speed while mixing in actual code as needed. Meanwhile, promises of codeless business apps don't seem rooted in any of those advances, and continue on from their dysfunctional predecessors. And people actually making business apps in a hurry pull from NPM or PyPI without ever touching "no code" tools. It seems like we might get much closer to that layer within a decade or so, but I don't think we're there yet.
• winrid 7y ago
  By "No Code" I like to think people mean "the code is already done and all the abstractions defined suit my needs as desired".
• Twirrim 7y ago
  I've luckily missed all the "no code" stuff. This has so many shades of that "no ops" nonsense that was being peddled about 5-10 years ago, which seems to be rooted in similar misunderstandings. If you want to run your company on a "no code" basis, good luck with that! I'm sure your Finance and product managers won't complain at all when they have their VBA macros taken away.
• scarface74 7y ago
  This is not new. There were plenty of companies promising the ability to create applications without writing code since the 80s.
• miguelmota 7y ago
  The problem with "No code" platforms is that you're relying on magic provided by the platform tools so when it's time to extend or modify the code it's a total nightmare (remember Dreamweaver?). In a sense it's vendor lock-in. "No code" systems work for simple things like visual layouts (Squarespace) or IFTT GUIs for simple actions but anything beyond will be a hassle to maintain and extend when you need to.
• 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  I always thought "no code" was a meme. Best example of "no code" were the traders I used to support working at a bank, they had these massive Excel sheets with weird macros that would break in non-deterministic ways.
• m0zg 7y ago
  There's a variant of this fallacy where people are sold on GUI frameworks in which design is separate from the code that drives the logic (i.e. XAML). The argument is, the designers can't code, and the coders can't design. That too doesn't really work if you want great UI, and it complicates the lives of both the designers (tooling is shitty) and the devs (the databound visual tree code is opaque AF and therefore impossible to debug).
• tomelders 7y ago
  This really resonates with me, but I don’t agree with it. It resonates because there’s a problem with software development that remains unarticulated. It seems no one is happy. Developers aren’t happy, and the stake holders aren’t either. For stakeholders, the people originating the ideas, signing the cheques and bankrolling the entire endeavour, programming really is a money pit, and programmers really are a pain in the ass. So no wonder people are so enchanted by the idea of software that doesn’t require code or coders. All they want is for their grand ideas to be realised as they imagine them. How hard can that be? If Computers can be made to identify faces, or translate French into Chinese, then surely their vision of an app that figures out the most efficient way to deliver parcels should be a walk in the park!? For me, herein lies the problem. Computers are seen as magical devices capable of anything. Software, or code, merely the spells and incantations that breath life into those machines and commit them to do your bidding. But! They are not magical devices. Code is not spells. Programmers are not magicians. There are constraints. Boundaries. Limitations. Great software is, in some way, defined by those boundaries. Great software is created not by people who believe that computers and code can be made to do anything. Great software is not the product of whim and whimsy. No. Great software is created by people who know the constraints, but see the opportunity within them. Take for example, the Spreadsheet. No accountant, or any other form of number cruncher was involved in the conceptualisation, implementation, or evolution of the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was born out of the minds of people who understood the capabilities of computers and code, and saw how they could be used to approach a problem from a different angle. I would argue that the most significant event in the evolution of the web — after it’s invention — was Ajax. Yet no one, not even the people who first implemented XMLHttpRequest, fully understood its true potential until Jesse James Garrett came along and clarified the concept and significance. HTTP had existed since 1996, and four years later, Roy Fielding gave us Rest — The recipe to a dish we already had the ingredients for. What’s my point? I suppose I may have gotten off track. My point is this: The problem is not that code is hard, or programmers difficult. The problem is that software — which was once borne out of opportunity that only the programmer could see — is now born of the whim and whimsy of people who know nothing of what a computer can do, or how it does it. Software is the folly of people who believe in magic. People who aren’t thinking “what can this machine do”, but rather “make this machine do what I demand”.
• ajnin 7y ago
  "No Code" tools do have an actual advantage in that they only allow to create valid programs. They don't prevent bugs however so that advantage is pretty tenuous, it's akin to a type system that works as you go. The main disadvantages are that they are harder to edit, copy, reuse, and quickly become a tangled mess when programs grow in size. Maybe there is a middle ground to find somewhere, keep text for editability and because our whole education system is based on it and I'm pretty sure humans have dedicated brain structures to process language, write basic blocks in a regular programming language, and create DSLs to write "business logic" in.
• mc3 7y ago
  "No code" doesn't mean no logical thinking, no worrying about changing requirements, no version control, no uptime and performance considerations, no cost considerations, no analysing requirements, ... very little of what a coder does is write code!
• blaze33 7y ago
  Once read how the "no code" trend isn't really more than a marketing one. Went more or less like this: it will be great to build software without having to write code: you'll just have to specify what your program does. Except that a program's exact specification is the definition of its code and that the job of writing such exact specifications is what developers do. Conclusion: any "no code" tool will just be another way to write code ;) Obviously the trick is in the difference between exact and fuzzy specifications. As a software engineer I could say my main job is to translate approximate specifications of business needs into a list of specific instructions on how to solve them i.e. code that can run on a computer. We'll probably have better tools and more efficient abstractions to do so but we'll still have to write some code. I guess the "no code" topic could better be treated as "years of experience vs. hours of training". During my first job I once had to use a graphical programming tool to design and run computer simulations of a power plant: just connect some predefined building blocks, input some simulation parameters in each block and voilà! Except that the simulations quickly started to require hundreds of said building blocks, so that my coworkers spent their days clicking around only to start over when we needed to use different simulation parameters. Got trained a few hours on how to use the graphical tool but couldn't accept I now had to click and input numbers all day long... Somehow found that an old user manual actually existed and discovered that I could instead write plain text files to specify the computer simulations. It used a very verbose ad-hoc language so I wrote a Python script to generate the files I needed and when the requirements changed I could redefine the simulation in minutes instead of days. Later got fired for being some sort of troublemaker but I now work as a fullstack dev in Python and Javascript.
• richardlblair 7y ago
  No code has been a thing for a long time. I don't think we need to be so defensive, though. The limitations of this approach haven't changed in the decades since its first inception. I think it's a little ignorant and short sighted to speak down on the current trend. The reality is, there used to be a whole host of no-code products that solved a whole host of problems. We haven't outgrown those problems, but the solutions we had didn't scale well with the technologies we use today. We need similar tools to those that we had before, updated and adapted for modern technology. Some of the new tools go a step further, which is incredible. Think about every aunt and uncle who have an idea that would solve a problem they and 10 of their friends have. Those 11 people are super stoked about the tool that Aunt Linda built. Why can't we let them have that?
• IC4RUS 7y ago
  The article mentions that, if you are not free to go, then the police must read you your Miranda rights. This appears to be a common understanding as well. However, other sources I've read state that police don't necessarily have to do this unless they want your testimony to be court-admissable (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/police-questioning-miranda-warnings-29930.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/police-questioning-m...). So I'm a bit confused - could someone clear this up for me?
  • fargle 7y ago
    In the US - See https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/police-questioning-miranda-warnings-29930.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/police-questioning-m... for example. Read carefully and you will notice: - they don't have to Mirandize you even if arrested or detained. If they don't, your answers and evidence based on them will probably be inadmissible, if your lawyer is not an incompetent boob. - they don't have to Mirandize you at all with no penalty unless you are detained or arrested. If you are "free to go", for example if asked a question at a traffic stop, Miranda is irrelevant. What you say will always be used against you. - always, in all circumstances, assume that your statements WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU. - At a traffic stop, you say "here is my license and registration" and "please, thank you, have a nice day". NOTHING else, which is quite a bit harder to do than it sounds. When in an adversarial position with the police, it's best to remember that it is literally not their job to be helping you. It's not their job to be "fair" or to be your ally. They are ALLOWED TO LIE to your face, and might do so. But the rest of the time, which is most of it, they are your ally. You will know which time is which - act accordingly. In all cases, respect is wise, is warranted, and is well deserved. Remember the number of our friends in blue who have died because of some bad person. And note that until they understand you, they may quite reasonably assume you are one. Don't be an A-hole and prove it to them. Don't lie, it would be obvious, suspicious, and insulting. Just say nothing or shrug. Don't be a dick and try to argue - save that for the courtroom which is when it is appropriate. But you still don't ever have to say things like "Gee I thought I was only doing 80" or "I didn't see that guy, he musta came outa nowhere"...
• ravivyas 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at a low-code startup. If anyone discounts nocode/lowcode they are missing the forest for the trees. NoCode always existed, the term is getting popular now. Wordpress is a nocode website builder. When you hit a 3rd party API, you are reducing a part of the problem to nocode. Would you care if the API was written in C/Java/Python or was a Zapier interface? Can nocode/lowcode reduce bottlenecks or speed up developer of critical but not urgent things/components definitely.
• h3ckr 7y ago
  Why isn't there a "nocode" tool that lets you buy the full source code once your user base reaches X? (for $Y). Both problems solved? (finding the right balance in the level of abstraction for the "nocode" tool's code shouldn't be a big deal).
• dscpls 7y ago
  This says it's very either or, and I think misses the point of a lot of nocode tools. One of the best measures of tools is their composability. Can you use this for what it's good at, and integrate that solution with another tool that's much harder to use but can solve the last 5-10% that's just too hacky or not supported directly by this tool? For my that's where zoho creator falls down a bit. Their APIs are just web form post handlers. But it works! We're doing a lot of stuff on webflow by dropping some custom javascript in there to hook it up to an API or do some very data-driven stuff beyond their interactions. The point is, nocode isn't just for proofs of concepts, although it's great for that. When evaluating nocode tools, look for integration/extension points, and think about your migration path should you need to replace it. Hopefully you're succefful enough to need that but don't build 100% of your app by hand because 10% actually needs hand-written code.
• axilmar 7y ago
  I've read plenty of comments about this article the last few days, it has made the rounds in popular sites, and the verdict is the same as the author's. What's surprising is that no one sees the elephant in the room: the problem with coding is that the abstractions available in coding are the same one offered by operating systems: files, processes, threads, mutexes, sockets etc. These are the wrong types of abstractions for the majority of cases!!! What we should have instead is data, functions, events and channels. If we had that, then we wouldn't need to have articles about 'no code', we wouldn't need visual programming tools. The abstractions we have now only get in the way of programming. They make development really slow. If we had the set of abstractions mentioned above, it would have been a lot easier to create solutions! I am not saying that the abstractions we have now are totally useless; they are not, of course, because they allow us to make things, but they aren't what we need in most cases.
• janci 7y ago
  Visual tools work great for creating models (i.e. entity diagrams). There is no reason why not generate 90% of the typical business CRUD app boilerplate from such model. Also business rules tend to be simple (decision tables, process workflows), no need to "code" these. If they are not simple enough for business user, representation in code will not help, so business rules should be kept simple. What I lack in visual/no-code environments: easy bidirectional integration. The no-code environment should be able to call into external service (REST, SOAP) or external library (any language) and represent this call as a Black box. The interface should be simple to be able to easily create the missing functionality in best-suited language for the task. But more importantly, the external implementation should be allowed to use all the powerful high-level abstractions that the no-code environment presents to the user. Otherwise, the external service will need to re-implement many of the useful functions of the no-code environment. You then lose all the benefits of the no-code counterpart and this transition is hard.
• l4r5 7y ago
  I use this metaphor: If you only learned 50 words from a new language, that may be enough to have a great 2 week vacation but it won't be enough to actually life somewhere else and do successful real legal business.At least it will be quite hard to do so. Learning a language to be able to do that will take some time and training. But once you learned it, life will be much more easier and success will be easier. Computer languages are called "languages" for a reason.
• joddystreet 7y ago
  We tried building NoCode (used to be hosted at noapp.mobi), I think around January 2017. The project has been abandoned since then, you can find the project at - 1. Docs - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki 2. Core - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core 3. Backend - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop 4. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline 5. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client Quick demo (forced under 2 minutes time, we tried to take this to TechCrunch), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg This was a POC project. It was quite suitable for simple business process management based apps. One of our customer has been using a conference room manager built on this platform, for 3 years now.
• awkward 7y ago
  The current focus No Code will create a large number of tools a skilled technologist can use to improve productivity. The new tools will open up problem domains where the time and budget wasn't there before. It's clearly not going to replace code, for reasons that everyone has enumerated here. The reason it's getting VC attention right now, though, is because No Code is a way to discipline the market for programmer salaries. Even if the effect of it is more glue code over more protocols, the goal is to shift jobs from engineers to technicians.
• ewgoforth 7y ago
  The idea that you can write software without having to learn to code goes all the way back to COBOL in the fifties. It was a big step forward in abstracting some of the details. As languages have progressed they abstract away details, but you still have to be able to think like a programmer, especially if you want your code to be performant.
• scottlocklin 7y ago
  I'm looking forward to the day when someone builds a labview type thing for some other common programmer function. Labview was literally an extinction event for instrumentation software engineers. Month long projects done in minutes. Same thing will eventually happen with something like devops, regardless of what programmer bros think.
• BerislavLopac 7y ago
  The obligatory Commit Strip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensiv...
• xiwenc 7y ago
  The delusion is thinking "no code" solves all your (classical) problems. It does not. No code is the future riding the waves of simplifying programming. Like going from C -> Java -> Python -> (Low code) -> No code
• imvetri 7y ago
  I have a working concept for "no framework Code" in front end web development. https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor#ui-editor https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor#ui-editor