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Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?

pmlnr 6y ago
Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple. frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience. They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.
- PaulWaldman 6y ago
  Ladder Logic is still used heavily in modern industrial automation systems. This isn't to ease development, but to aid in the supportability by folks who don't have a background in software and are used to reading electrical prints.
outworlder 6y ago
> Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is. Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.
jrockway 6y ago
It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.) Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.
analog31 6y ago
I believe the answer is yes: Excel. Even without using macros, it's basically dataflow programming and a built in user interface structure. People solve problems and build useful tools using Excel, even those who have no realistic expectation of ever learning to write code. In fact it may be the most widespread programming tool. Are there things it can't do, and problems with scalability and collaborative development? Sure. But BASIC had those problems and nobody says it isn't programming. I've seen master programmers use Excel, when they wanted to do something with mixed-type tabular data and graphs, that they could share for others to use. For a lot of people, hacking a spreadsheet together is easier than trying to communicate their needs to a programmer.

Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple. frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience. They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.

PaulWaldman 6y ago
Ladder Logic is still used heavily in modern industrial automation systems. This isn't to ease development, but to aid in the supportability by folks who don't have a background in software and are used to reading electrical prints.

outworlder 6y ago

> Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is. Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.

jrockway 6y ago

It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.) Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.

analog31 6y ago

I believe the answer is yes: Excel. Even without using macros, it's basically dataflow programming and a built in user interface structure. People solve problems and build useful tools using Excel, even those who have no realistic expectation of ever learning to write code. In fact it may be the most widespread programming tool. Are there things it can't do, and problems with scalability and collaborative development? Sure. But BASIC had those problems and nobody says it isn't programming. I've seen master programmers use Excel, when they wanted to do something with mixed-type tabular data and graphs, that they could share for others to use. For a lot of people, hacking a spreadsheet together is easier than trying to communicate their needs to a programmer.