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I've gotten sucked into this in the form of MS Power Automate, and it just seems to make everything more complicated and confusing. I spend most of my time look

I've gotten sucked into this in the form of MS Power Automate, and it just seems to make everything more complicated and confusing. I spend most of my time looking for workarounds to try to get back the ability to do stuff that any programming language allows. I only learned Access and VBA about a year ago, but I tend to agree with the people who say Microsoft has broken up parts of the functionality of this reasonably useful workhorse into various products, all with their own learning curve and without caring much about covering all that you could previously do. I'm beginning to think it's just a scam, where Microsoft and others sell a vision to people who can't judge it because they don't know what programming is...and the point is to have an incredibly convoluted and random licensing system where every little thing requires paying more money. It feels as calculated and predatory as a casino. What "no code" boils down to, it appears to me thus far, is you don't have the version control, the refactoring ability, the ability to reuse code, the ability to see a reasonable amount of logic at once, the ability to easily copy and paste, the security of an editor that won't randomly mangle your code (sorry, it isn't code, it's...uh...JSON) it's just on and on, things you can't do, and nothing added in exchange except the label of "no code". And I don't see how anything complex can be maintained; it merely has the political advantage that you don't have to designate a developer to maintain it...but in reality, it's if anything harder to understand.

bokstavkjeks 6y ago
From how I understand it, the idea behind Power Automate isn't to move programmers over to it. It's to allow other people in the business to automate their workflows without bringing in developers. No/low code systems are great for departments such as accounting and finance, they typically have some tasks that are great targets for automation, and the workers know more about the process than the developers. If the workers can create the automation without bringing in developers it can save quite a bit of resources over time. These people are also not all that keen on actually learning programming languages, source control, version control, and all of that. They just have a problem in their day-to-day work they'd like to solve. If you want the "developer experience" (source control, some code, etc.) while also having access to the flow-based editor you should look into Azure logic apps instead.
rhlsthrm 6y ago
This makes me feel like there's a good niche for "developer-friendly no-code". I'm a developer and I don't like no-code solutions for all the things you mention. These current tools try to abstract a lot but it ends up becoming severely limited and hard to debug/extend. They might be okay for things like internal business tools, which is what most of them seem to be targeting. On the other hand, I've been playing with Hasura recently. As a full-stack developer, it's amazing. It gets rid of tons of boilerplate for back end dev, and I can focus on building features rather than CRUD plumbing. It's easily extensible using serverless functions. It feels like it's helpful to me more than trying to replace what I do.

bokstavkjeks 6y ago

From how I understand it, the idea behind Power Automate isn't to move programmers over to it. It's to allow other people in the business to automate their workflows without bringing in developers. No/low code systems are great for departments such as accounting and finance, they typically have some tasks that are great targets for automation, and the workers know more about the process than the developers. If the workers can create the automation without bringing in developers it can save quite a bit of resources over time. These people are also not all that keen on actually learning programming languages, source control, version control, and all of that. They just have a problem in their day-to-day work they'd like to solve. If you want the "developer experience" (source control, some code, etc.) while also having access to the flow-based editor you should look into Azure logic apps instead.

rhlsthrm 6y ago

This makes me feel like there's a good niche for "developer-friendly no-code". I'm a developer and I don't like no-code solutions for all the things you mention. These current tools try to abstract a lot but it ends up becoming severely limited and hard to debug/extend. They might be okay for things like internal business tools, which is what most of them seem to be targeting. On the other hand, I've been playing with Hasura recently. As a full-stack developer, it's amazing. It gets rid of tons of boilerplate for back end dev, and I can focus on building features rather than CRUD plumbing. It's easily extensible using serverless functions. It feels like it's helpful to me more than trying to replace what I do.