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The No-Code Generation is arriving

• redleggedfrog 6y ago
  Not really. The problem isn't coding or not coding or whatever. It's the problem of expressing complex logic and calculations to meet your ends. If you can't express those ideas on a computer then you're not going to get anywhere making software. The problem is that kind of thinking is hard, and requires the use of something more complex than the no-code tools available now or in the foreseeable future. The nifty part about programming is the concepts are transferable to other areas. No-code tools generally don't offer that - you learn how to do Minecraft or Excel, but then when you're out of that tool your skills don't apply. I see this with young people frequently now. For example, a bunch of Excel VBA functions that do essentially the same thing but with a number in their name to determine some functionality. When asked why they don't they just pass the number as a parameter to a single function the answer is that's too difficult and what they have works fine. This is from a recent graduate in engineering. Making software without coding doesn't really do anything but let you assemble pre-made parts. That's fine for some relatively simple thing, but will never give you the power of coding.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    It's the problem of expressing complex logic and calculations to meet your ends This transcends programming. It is fundamental to basic success in life. You have to know how to form ideas, express those ideas, and then act on those ideas. I had a very little bit of U.S. Army training. (Nice people, turned out not to be my thing.) One of the things that we were taught is that a big reason some armies are more successful than others is because some train their soldiers to think, others train them to blindly follow orders. Another arena where we see this is education. There is no shortage of people graduating from high school and college who can pass written exams through memorization. But there is a massive shortage of people graduating from high school and college who can think.
• subtypefiddler 6y ago
  Links to avoid verizon's obnoxious "policy-wall": - https://outline.com/XZYvKa https://outline.com/XZYvKa - https://web.archive.org/web/20201026181132/https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/the-no-code-generation-is-arriving/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201026181132/https://techcrunc... (seems to successfully load then fails after a few seconds)
  • ntietz 6y ago
    What's Verizon's "policy-wall"?
• getpolarized 6y ago
  I think no-code is taking going a bit too far but definitely less code is becoming a major opportunity for innovation.
  • claudeganon 6y ago
    We already invented this. It's called Python.
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      package managers would like a word
    • tim333 6y ago
      I was thinking Python kind of fits the description of low code. It will also work with almost anything unlike GUI based stuff.
      • claudeganon 6y ago
        I didn’t even mean it as a slight to Python! I love the language and how much boiler plate it removes for me.
• thisisnico 6y ago
  After seeing the no-code movement over and over again, I do not believe that this time it is any different. From MS Access days, Adobe's Dreamweaver, and many other forms of no-code solutions, the environment that supports no-code requires a tremendous amount of code. Knowing how to code can help you optimize, automate, configure no-code solutions. The end result is always back to code.
  • waynecochran 6y ago
    It turns out that language is an amazingly powerful way to describe solutions to problems. Nothing really better has come along.
    • asdfman123 6y ago
      Software engineers spend every day trying to automate away their jobs, and it's hardly a conservative field. If it were easier to use a visual interface than code, then devs would figure it out and we'd all start doing it. The "no code" revolution is probably more accurately the Microsoft Access replacement for our generation. Sleeker, cooler, more professional. But like Access, you have to replace it with real software when it starts getting complex.
    • paulgb 6y ago
      I think this is just it: text has a higher information density than (say) visual programming tools. At some point you quickly reach an amount of threshold of complexity where you either need to: 1. Hide parts of the program (e.g. hidden cells on a spreadsheet; attributes of nodes in a visual programming environment) 2. Switch to text for the higher information density. I think the burden of #1 quickly surpasses the burden of learning to work with #2.
  • asdfman123 6y ago
    No code can be great if you want to spin up something simple quickly. Once it grows to any reasonable level of complexity it becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Access was actually a great tool for allowing semi-technical people make quick apps, but almost every shop I've been in has needed to convert Access to grown-up software.
• Retric 6y ago
  This reads like it’s bizarrely out of touch with reality. Or is that just me?
  • yasp 6y ago
    It reads like an advertisement.
    • taywrobel 6y ago
      An advertisement for pivot tables of all things. What an oddly specific concept to fixate on as an example of shifting technical competence.
      • sidpatil 6y ago
        Don't underestimate how much middle managers love pivot tables.
  • ravenstine 6y ago
    It feels like it wasn't written by anyone who knows much about the actual nature of programming computers. As others have pointed out, the desire to build things without coding knowledge has always been there, and there will always be a place for it. An ice cream shoppe should probably use Squarespace instead of hiring a coder for thousands more. However, until we have sufficient AI, executives will always request features that can't be achieved with whatever no-code building blocks are available. Contrary to others, I do think there will come a day where the human computer programmer is completely obsolete, but we are definitely not there yet.
    • ebj73 6y ago
      I think that'll be the same day as authors are completely obsolete.
  • Dirlewanger 6y ago
    It's a tech journalist, so of course they don't know about tech.
• oxfordmale 6y ago
  The No Code generation has been arriving and departing in the last 4 decades. No Code is code you don't control and that often turns out to be the main bottleneck.
  • Yuioup 6y ago
    I'm seeing statements like "There are not enough programmers in the world to service the demand for applications" being pushed hard.
    • draugadrotten 6y ago
      And they are false. "There are not enough programmers in the world that are willing to work for free" might be closer to the truth. I know unemployed programmers so it's no shortage of supply.
      • greenonions 6y ago
        "The stakeholders who desire applications are not willing to buy it at it's current price; either because they know that the application is not valuable or do not know the application is valuable."
        • patentatt 6y ago
          Kind of, but the real way I see it is: “there is a whole wide swath of problems that would benefit from simple programming/automation, but they aren’t ROI positive to pay a professional programmer to do.” So the no/low code stuff can change that and lower the barrier to introduce automation and programmability to a big tranche of problem areas that aren’t served by ‘traditional’ development. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
        • benhurmarcel 6y ago
          Or because the application hacked together in Excel for "free" already does the job. Ugly, but it works for cheap.
      • 6y ago
• Retric 6y ago
  Excel is still the biggest and most successful no-code tool. The real problem with no code, is the tools take a lot to learn well and it rarely transfers between roles at the same job.
  • msla 6y ago
    > Excel is still the biggest and most successful no-code tool. Yep, people sure write a lot of code in Excel. (Well, what do you think formulas are?)
    • icholy 6y ago
      Even basic cell references are a type of code.
      • Grustaf 6y ago
        In that sense, any no code platform is also code.
  • waynecochran 6y ago
    With spreadsheets, particular google's flavor, I still think of it as functional / declarative programming.
    • mainstreem 6y ago
      Ever seen Smartsheets? I know someone I'd have described as "nontechnical" several years ago who is practically building business-specific applications complete with frontend interfaces and backed by spreadsheets and almost all of this person's code is formulas, which are very "functional programming." This person has asked to be coached in writing a "real" programming language and it's a challenge to think of how to approach the problem based upon the person's existing skillset and understanding, which is entirely backwards (FP instead of imperative) from the usual student's!
  • thisisnico 6y ago
    And some of the most advanced Excel spreadsheets make use of Visual Basic to automate processes. Even with no code solutions, The most advanced users will want to automate and integrate, using code.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AlexandrB 6y ago
  This mostly reads like marketing copy for the tools mentioned. In my experience, they're good - even great - at some things but also limited once your needs become more complex. And excel is not going away anytime soon. However, the ending is completely inexplicable: > The No-Code Generation has the potential to finally fill that missing productivity gap in the global economy, making our lives better, while saving time for everyone. What gap is this referring to? The gap between productivity and compensation? How does increasing productivity "fill" it? It's also pretty funny to define a generation by the productivity software that's available.
  • Grustaf 6y ago
    Almost everything in tech crunch reads like marketing copy these days it seems!
    • fullshark 6y ago
      It's almost as if journalism involves sifting through the PR pitches in your email inbox, and deciding which ones make good enough copy to hit your weekly/daily news story quota.
  • ip26 6y ago
    I have no idea what the name of this "gap" is. But, there are still countless workers trudging through mind-numbing tedium who could regain hours or days per week with a moderate application of no-code. I've helped several do just this.
    • jnsie 6y ago
      I honestly thought this was by design. If not by design, I find it difficult to explain the fact that so many developers create CRUD apps as a means to earning a living and have done for decades.
    • redis_mlc 6y ago
      > I've helped several do just this. Interested in hearing more. Which tools have you evangelized?
• iamcurious 6y ago
  >Of course, no-code tools often require code, or at least, the sort of deductive logic that is intrinsic to coding. You have to know how to design a pivot table, or understand what machine learning capability is and what it might be useful for. You have to think in terms of data, and about inputs, transformations and outputs. Is in this context "no-code" synonymous with "low-code"? Or are there differences?
• layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  "the suit is back"
• spicyramen 6y ago
  After spending few days dealing with protobufers, authentication libraries and cookies. I disagree that the non code movement is even an option. Not for us backend engineers.
  • arcturus17 6y ago
    No-code interfaces suck compared to a decently crafted custom UI too, except maybe the most static of websites.
• krsdcbl 6y ago
  "no code" is just "somebody else's code" with a GUI. We're more than just a generation away from being able to generate meaningful application outside of the original toolings scope without coding it at some point in the pipeline
  • trey-jones 6y ago
    Always keeping a sharp eye out for denial, I believe this seems completely obvious to people that actually write code and/or build software for a living. 1. As many others point out, "no-code" is just a different way of representing code/logic. The skills are the same, except for typing. 2. Even if it did take off, someone still has to maintain the code for the no-code tools. I guess eventually the no-code tools are meant to be written in no-code. This doesn't happen overnight.
    • syshum 6y ago
      While somewhat true, my experiance with these types of products see this following reoccuring pattern 1. Sales for a No Code product talks up how you will not need programmers to create solutions 2. Company buys No Code product deploys it to users 3. A few users "get it" and create solutions with no code 4. Something in the environment changes, or the original creators of the solution move on from the company and the "no code" solution breaks, no one can fix it or understand what broke or even really explain the "solution" 5. Devs / SysAdmins now have to detangle and figure out how these "no code" solutions works, what they were suppose to be doing in the first place, and figure out why they do not work any more. Often times this results in the dev / admin just redoing everything properly, in a proper programming enviroment because there was no logic to no-code solution
      • kevincox 6y ago
        3. Sounds like the company just found the people who had programmer tendencies.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        Sounds like the marketing was correct: they were able to create solutions without hiring programmers to do it. There's a reason excel is so ludicrously wildly popular as a business tool. It lets accountants do things you used to need a programmer for. That the automation may eventually grow so complex as to require a programmer anyway is not relevant to the utility of excel.
• vogtb 6y ago
  I think that no-code and low-code a real movements, and are going to be popular. But the terms are too broad to have a productive discussion about what their power really is. Are all tools with programmatic capabilities low-code? Where do we draw the line? Or is this just a new paradigm, and eventually all platforms/tools/products/SaaS-companies are low/no-code? It seems like there's room for distinction here.
• eruci 6y ago
  The no-code generation was always here, even before the advent of coding. It would make more sense to say that the more we code, the more possibilities for no-coders.
• wimagguc 6y ago
  No-code is useful for building enough of the app to figure out whether there's a market for it in the first place. It's not fair to compare it to building the actual product with an actual team -- a more realistic alternative would be outsourcing the prototype/beta to some random team.
• hnxs 6y ago
  Article TLDR: Workers over ~30 love Excel. Younger workers are willing to try new webapps that are like Excel, but with squircles and in the cloud. These tools include a number of SAAS startups whose marketing departments definitely did not pay Techcrunch any money to get plugged in this article. Your job or career as a software engineer is not threatened, though the title was intended to make you feel that way in order to bait clicks. Assuming you don’t work on Excel, that is.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Does remind me a bit of "Breaking News: The Suit is Back!" I guess no code is back too. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• seph-reed 6y ago
  Being able to code is an essential part of complete integration with the next stage of development for the human mind: attaching a computer to your brain. No-code will be like not having a pre-frontal cortex... (not that everyone engages it that often). Anyone who can code is already part way towards being able to "think with a computer." Coders can solve problems that brains alone can not.
• easywood 6y ago
  Seriously, who is writing these articles? I've seen this kind of thing come and go since the last 20 years. But this time it's different! No it is'nt. Users are now eMp0wErEd! You give 'em this drag and drop interface and they will cHanGe thE wOrlD!! No they won't.
• tgb 6y ago
  I got into programming from a no-code tool as a kid: Stagecraft. An education/gamedev tool aimed at kids and looking back it was really neat. You had a grid and gave rules to objects on the grid by pattern-matching the surrounding grid cells. Right arrow key makes the player move right, if the cell to the right is empty. If there's a block already to the right but an empty square beyond it, move the player and the block. You just laid out a "start" state and a "final" state and whenever the start state was met, it would replace with the end state. A ton of basic (and not-so-basic) games and fun things could be made really easily with this. More advanced users could do something closer to traditional programming by giving objects variables and manipulating those, making "folders" of rules that controlled which ones could run, etc. I made a fairly full-fledged short JRPG in it, and other people's projects were even better. Frankly, I finished more gamedev projects playing around with that than I ever did after learning to code! I could see something like that succeeding in the modern era if you make it easier to share - you needed Stagecraft to run anything made by it. Anything modern with this grid+rule system like that already?
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Off the top of my head, PuzzleScript[0] sounds similar. There are some really good games written in it too. Although since the rules are written in text and pretty opaque, one wonders if a GUI tool to write PuzzleScript rules might make it more accessible. [0] https://www.puzzlescript.net/ https://www.puzzlescript.net/
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• taytus 6y ago
  No-code tools makes easy to make the first 95% and impossible to make the other 5%.
• phamilton4 6y ago
  I always laugh when the "No-Code" tools I'm forced/required to use have a section/editor/process for writing code or using external code. Maybe I haven't had much experience with the "No-Code" tools, but it does seem like a sham. I think the proper term for these products should be "Low(er)-Code".
• zwieback 6y ago
  A few weeks back I was sitting at an outdoor table in Florence, Oregon, not exactly a high-tech hotspot. At the next table two ladies that I arrogantly categorized as type "nail salon employee" were chatting about this and that but pretty soon their conversation turned to pivot table mastery, and that's where they got really quite excited. So yes, I think no-code has been with us for a long time and will continue in various forms.
• themantra514 6y ago
  in Terminator voice "Learn to code if you want to live."
• ptmcc 6y ago
  The problem with every no-code solution I've seen is that it is dependent on a sufficiently detailed specification with defined handling of edge cases and errors and exceptions... and at that point your specification starts to look an awful lot like code.
• ralphc 6y ago
  Salesforce pushes this, first with Process Builder, now with Flow. I'm doing a small project for a charity using Flow, as a programmer my main frustration is all the pointing and clicking instead of just typing into an editor, but I can see the appeal to non-programmers. I've been a programmer for 36 years, and I'm half "this has been worked on for decades and it hasn't taken off" and "this has been worked on for decades, maybe someone will get it right some day".
• bitwize 6y ago
  I'm old enough to remember "CASE tools" from the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s, we were told that architects would design a system in UML, and thr machine would generate the code for it from the UML. It fails every time with much wasted effort and gnashing of teeth. The reason is because once you've specified your requirements in enough detail for a machine to understand and reasonably act on, your spec -- or diagram, flowchart, whatever -- is isomorphic to constructs in some programming language. So you haven't made code go away, only transformed it -- into something that is, all things considered, vastly more cumbersome than text to work with.
• loco5niner 6y ago
  Someone has to build the no-code tools. Even then, knowing how to code helps you no-code, especially when something goes wrong.
• izgzhen 6y ago
  I think that no-code enables non-programmer to produce more workable prototypes without any help from programmer. This speeds up the iteration. If a prototype is proven to be useful, then it can be given to professional programmers to hash out the details and build a robust version. Actually -- programmers' opinions on no-code solutions are irrelevant. The non-programmers' ones are more important.
  • thisisbrians 6y ago
    This is exactly how we use no-code at my startup. It allows non-programmers to iterate with the product manager on a solution's design before it makes it to the dev team's plate.
  • dolmen 6y ago
    The problem is that it's never how those solutions are sold, and rarely how they are bought. No-code solutions are ok for quick prototyping of automating processes that are not the core of the business. When you start using them you have to define the step where you will switch to a more maintainable solution. This is the same as deciding when to use a shell script and when to decide to rewrite the script in a stronger programming language.
• bilater 6y ago
  Not surprised everyone on HN is hating on this. While there is merit to the argument that working on a high abstraction level is limiting and fragile there are two main points nerds ignore. 1) This is a great enabling tool for non tech folks who 99% of the time need a basic CRUD app. A whole new world is opened to them and they and the world is better for it. 2) The people who can get the most out of these tools, sadly, are the people on this thread. Its the folks who understand the low level well who can be super effective at the high level. If you understand CSS you can be a beast on Webflow and 10X your speed of development. But sadly this is unlikely to happen because these people sit on a high horse and look down on these tools and I suspect are a little insecure about how it can impact their value prop. So they never will take the leap and not realize the gains in productivity.
  • thiht 6y ago
    >This is a great enabling tool for non tech folks who 99% of the time need a basic CRUD app I always see this, but can you name a single popular app that is just a "basic CRUD", with no specific business logic? I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I genuinely cannot think of a single one
    • bilater 6y ago
      airbnb, blog/content sites, membership sites with a couple of restricted routes (CRUD + confetti on top), landing pages etc
    • tluyben2 6y ago
      It would not be popular mostly; these are departmental apps in big corps built on top of subsets of the 1000s of tables. They can contain some business logic, but that can be ‘no code’ as well (flow chart kind of stuff); these systems are usually not the nicest to use, however much (!) nicer than the systems the tables originally belong to. So see it as a small team/person needs to enter certain type of data; they can learn to wade through miles of SAP menus, or someone clicks together a little crud (web) app that does exactly that and cannot do anything else. There are many 1000s of these cases, but they do not get popular as they stay inside the companies (departments) they are created in.
• xyst 6y ago
  I can see using a no code solution for quick proof of concepts, but going to production with a no-code solution is likely a no-go.
• 908B64B197 6y ago
  I'm skeptical on No-Code. All the solutions I used were mostly tailored to a single use case, and they made it easy to get 95% of the work done. I'll even include interface builders as no-code. Then getting to the finish line has always involved writing serious code that would plug itself to the proprietary API whatever No-Code-Solution-du-Jour supported. Of course, if the company selling the no-code goes under, good luck! Then there's collaborative work and source control support. Most folks are comfortable with GSuite-Style collaborative work but that really doesn't scale. But there's still a fundamental issue. Every time I worked with non-technical folks using no-code, there was a subset of users that just "got it" almost right away and would end up exploring and maxing out what the tool could do. But the majority of users seemed to be confused and could not move past the hand-holding tutorials. It's almost as if the former could describe what they want so well that it's not ambiguous...
• gettingsnarky 6y ago
  Cannot wait to see how no-code is able to communicate, gather actionable data from, process said data and send a signal back to this bespoke piece of hardware sitting on my desk. All within the require amount (ahem, very tiny) of time!
• anotherforsure 6y ago
  Low code is very useful in creating basic crud apps and workflows. Hacker news is full of experts who know everything, but our teams are not all posting here. If you adopt a good low code framework that you understand inside and out, then you can achieve a lot of output with an inexperienced team. I use a LOT of co-ops to develop full applications using Oracle's low code solution, because we don't need anything more complex than that. Complex shit should be done by our ERP, I'm just turning a manager's spreadsheet and half baked business process into a well built system. Plus, I use the low code solution as a training ground for our more complex technologies, its great for weeding out the duds. You should still have a programmer do the work though. I have seen far to many smart business analysts fail because they get hung up on the programming basics.
• jdefr89 6y ago
  Love when "No code" solutions come up every so many years just to simply die off.. I remember teaching myself VB6 in sixth grade and after realizing the reason "No Code" solutions are misleading are 1. There isn't really such a thing and 2. The power of computers comes precisely from the ability to.. code them at a meaningful level of abstraction. Don't get me wrong, "No code" may have a purpose, but I see that purpose being more in line with mock-ups and concept tests; not eliminating code.
  • jt2190 6y ago
    Indeed! Look around at any mature software and you start to notice that it can be worked with at multiple levels. Perhaps it’s a bunch of built-in features to most users, with a smaller group of users tailoring things with “add ons” and “plug-ins” and “apps”, and finally an even smaller group who writes their own extensions or integrates another application with the API. “No code” is always what software vendors sell in the beginning. Eventually, they win a large enough audience that they have to add full programmability, if only to automate the testing and management of things, and someone waves enough money at them to allow for some custom thing or other.
• Jyaif 6y ago
  To the people that say that true No-Code will never happen: It has always been possible to create software without writing code, it's just that historically it has been expensive.
• tluyben2 6y ago
  This has been there for the past 40 years at least; there were dbase tools, case tools, rad tools, 4gl etc. One reason I know of from experience from no/low code use by companies and why they gave it up over the past 25 years I have been working professionally in software dev is not that they were too inflexible (they were but that was not the issue; companies grew around the processes, not processes around companies); it was because all of them were proprietary and they got sold and killed off. There are hardly any open source ones or stable ones (as in price/support/upkeep etc) (which you need if you want to run your corps erp etc in top for decades), especially in the past. Now it is even worse; for the 80/90s ones, when you had it locally installed, it would still work now, but with the cloud, it is just waiting for the company to shut the doors or getting sold and gone is your company infrastructure. Even the on premise installs are not enough; you need a lot more. I saw a lot clients choosing Outsystems because you could eject to readable c# or java. Not sure if anyone ever did but I know it was used as a reason to pick them over others. At least they spent time making the ejected code looking ok: many do not have the option and then you have, at most, an on-premise blob which, probably you cannot use after the company gets sold, dies or gets into legal issues.
• nathias 6y ago
  Code is the closest to a bike for a mind, we're still not there with languages design etc. but I don't think there will ever be a no-code generation, maybe for building some or even most software, but we already have wordpress.
• swiley 6y ago
  There are two kinds of "No-Code." The kind where the data type you need already has code for it and just needs configuration. And the kind that needs code to implement the data type you need.
• mring33621 6y ago
  This type of thing has been tried for decades. Sometimes successfully -- see MS Access & Labview. My related comment from a past, similar discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20042225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20042225
• honkycat 6y ago
  I always say: We ( Software developers ) are ALREADY working as high a level as possible, and invest aggressively when we can see we can cut out work that does not add business value. Compare local data centers, to AWS, to Kubernetes. The reason we use text is because it is information dense, portable, and easier to refactor. If drawing lines between shapes could have these same properties I am sure we would use them. We are not manufacturing work for ourselves, we are not hiding "the good stuff" in the back to force people to continue to pay us. If someone comes up with a perfect no-code solution it will be a multi billion-dollar revolution.
  • fossuser 6y ago
    I agree - but I also think a perfect no-code solution will meet initial resistance. Just like binary to assembly did, and assembly to C did, and C to python did, etc. etc. People always resist the next level of abstraction. Either because they have to relearn something, or because there's some status associated with it being hard, or something else. It's just the nature of people for most to resist the new abstraction. This doesn't mean the perfect no-code solution is here, but just because people are dismissing it at first also isn't evidence that it's not. I think there's a lot more we could do with just visualizations around making the regular programming tooling way better: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
    • darkcha0s 6y ago
      > This doesn't mean the perfect no-code solution is here, but just because people are dismissing it at first also isn't evidence that it's not. wut?
• brw12 6y ago
  I'm a huge skeptic of no-code among my friends and colleagues. But seeing how pretty much everyone else here is also expressing skepticism, let me play devil's advocate. I recognize that the utopian promise of no-code is nonsense. There will always be feature demands that violate the "on-rails" nature of the environment, and either require supplementary code, or require waiting for the platform's coders to code up support, or require rebuilding the application from the ground-up. That said, there are all sorts of applications that really are so narrow that an existing GUI can accommodate them. Other posters here have called out Excel/Sheets as an example; Wordpress, Squarespace and WYSIWYG web page editors are another. As a coder, I always feel frustrated by WYSIWYG interfaces' side effects, limitations, and inevitable bugs, but people do use them all the time, productively. Of course, both web editors and spreadsheets do involve the ability to write code! It's just that the code's role is very narrow and limited to a small expressive range (CSS, say, or various SUMs and HLOOKUPs). When the domain is relatively narrow and its boundaries are pretty clear, no-code can be wonderful. The real question, right now, is whether applications that are innovative can be built using "no-code" tools that necessarily assume all sorts of limitations. I have seen some clever and impressive uses of, say, Airtable + Zapier + Typeform. That sort of "API-weaving" seems to me the most promising direction for no-code. I'm more skeptical of the projects, like bubble.io, which try to be a sort of Photoshop-for-building-applications.
  • acoard 6y ago
    Let me add to this. My viewpoint is similar to yours, and I have some anecdotal info to support this devil's advocate. My wife was able to setup a WordPress site that sold fundraiser raffle tickets for her Rotary Club. The event was on local TV and handled a spike in traffic – thousands of ticket sales in a few hours – with no problem. This whole thing cost her less than $300, which would only get a few hours if she had to hire a dev. I kept on telling her I was on standby and could help out, but she didn't need it once. She built the entire thing with WYSIWYG and WordPress plugins. No-one is saying you build your tech startup with no-code WYSIWYG. But imagine if my wife's no-code skills (in her place, WordPress) became as common place as knowing Microsoft Office.
    • 6y ago
• xaedes 6y ago
  "No Code" needs to embrace code. They are just tools and/or higher abstractions. Embrace the fact that at one point you need to go down the abstraction layers and enable the users to do this, and do it well. E.g. Unity is "no code" for a lot of stuff (putting scene together), but you also need code for other stuff. Essentially for those tools to succeed they must allow mixing their abstractions and visuals with lower level code, in my opinion.
• offtop5 6y ago
  No Code just means visual scripting. If you've ever seen a UE4 Blueprint you'll see this can be even worse than just writing the code out. I'd be very much against teaching this, you learn no real skills. Congrats, you know how to make a Blueprint in one specific tool. You can't get a programing job or even use another tool easily.
• epx 6y ago
  What will happen is, the no-code generation will rediscover that Turing-complete machines are great, and code is the easiest form to express arbitrary algorithms. In time, they also discover no-code is not portable, you are tied more tightly to a particular framework. No-code may be more difficult to version control. This fad has happened a number of times: SQL, CASE, 4GL languages (more like an analogy - people discover that 4GL langs are limited and move to 3GL), spreadsheets, XSLT...
• onelastjob 6y ago
  Blueprints in Unreal Engine is a good example of no-code that works well.
• monksy 6y ago
  I've worked on a "no code" platform before (HP-OO). You still have to understand CS concepts and ideas. Heck, I even created a reusable component to do async polling. (Because how do you explain that as a single integration.. you really cant') This is nothing but PR drivel to suggest that we can get millions of kids as cheap labor to be spring developers on their platform.
• santoshalper 6y ago
  I expect it to arrive the year after Linux On The Desktop.
• slimed 6y ago
  Code generation is against my religion so "no code generation" is a welcome headline.
• hermitcrab 6y ago
  As someone who has been programming professionally since the 80s, I have seen the idea of 'no code' system development being hyped every few years. Visual drag and drop tools are not going to make coding obselete in the forseeable future. But they can be very useful in well defined domains. I am currently working on a 'no-code' drag and drop tool for data transformation. I have been able to create transforms that cover ~95% of cases. But there always going to be edge cases I can't cover. So I have included the ability the write some Javascript. ;0)
• benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  I think a lot of people who've commented clearly feel threatened by the concept of no-code and have default knee-jerk reaction anytime it's mentioned (how many comments are about the article vs the concept). Maybe there's also a theme of being troubled by the notion that the masses might cause a mess with these tools and shouldn't be trusted. I think this kind of reaction is inevitable when people with power and privilege feel threatened by another group who are claiming some power for themselves. Here's what the article was really about: > The key here is that no-code tools aren’t successful just because they are easier to use — they are successful because they are connecting with a new generation that understands precisely the sort of logic required by these platforms to function. It may be a poorly written click-baity article or you may think the conclusions are wrong but you can't dismiss the reality that a generation of people are being exposed to programming concepts in an entirely different way to our experiences. This is fascinating whatever you think about the tools themselves. Isn't the interesting discussion to be had here more about what this will mean for end-user software going forwards? - Does this trend maybe mean that it's vitally important that we build some forms of open standards around this kind of technology? - Should we rethink programming education for young people knowing that many are likely to have exposure to concepts no-code introduces? - What does FOSS look like with no-code - do we need some serious FOSS tools in this space? I think there are a lot more interesting avenues to explore beyond "I don't like this trend" and "we've seen abstractions get higher-level before and we haven't been put out of a job yet so what's all the fuss about".
  • jkingsbery 6y ago
    I don't read the skepticism as "I don't like this trend," but rather "this trend is not new." And I agree with you that the relationship that people have with computers is fascinating. But as others have pointed out when you tell people "You can do all this stuff without coding," but when what you're really doing is making it easier for people to code while calling it "not code," you're forcing them to reinvent this history of computing, but now they don't have the language to connect what they're doing to what the industry has been doing since 1959. But the article is just very self contradictory. It doesn't make sense to say "The No-Code Generation is arriving," while also saying that "Lua has never been more popular," or that we just had "the largest increase among all of the [Advanced Placement] organization’s dozens of tests" or "Meanwhile at top universities, computer science has emerged as the top or among the top majors, pulling in hundreds of new students per campus per year." Quite clearly, besides "no-code" platforms, there quite clearly is a growth in interest in traditional coding tools as well.
• austincheney 6y ago
  As a JavaScript developer looking at past JavaScript jobs clearly No Code is a very real thing, but it only means not writing code yourself. The result is as incompetent as it sounds: hiring developers to write code and yet not expect them to write code. I am always surprised that any employer would buy into this stupidity, but it’s the common approach.
• m3kw9 6y ago
  No code generation is a bit like building a living room with ikea parts. You can only do so much with that. As opposed to hiring a pro carpenter and crafting pieces or in building it to walls etc.
• wsowens 6y ago
  I guess I'm a member of this "No-Code" generation? My friends and I were playing Minecraft when we were 12 years old, and we're entering the workforce now. I share the skepticism from other commenters in this thread. Maybe it's just anecdata, but I don't see my peers using super high level GUI replacements for data analysis. My friends in marketing, engineering, biotechnology, and using the same tools as the millennials before us: Excel / Google Sheets. In fact, most learned how to use those tools on the job or in college, not from their earlier education. > Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might... put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services. I have seen people using Squarespace, but again, I've seen older millennials pick up such software just as readily. My friends that are fluent in data analysis acquired their proficiency through traditional, code-heavy approaches (R, Python, a good dose of command-line interfaces). I guess my point is that, if you want to fill this "missing productivity gap in the global economy", mere exposure to Minecraft and website builders is not a substitute for a comprehensive C.S. curriculum.
• bob1029 6y ago
  The best I have been able to achieve is a solution which initially requires fully-custom code, and then evolves into something where the most maintenance-heavy parts are data-driven and managed via a web interface by the business. Trying to make 100% of your solution no-code is a fool's errand at best, and a tragic whale hunt on average. Especially, if you set out to achieve a no-code solution from day 1. There are certainly trivial problem domains where no-code solutions are good answers (e.g. IFTTT). But, there isn't much money or glory in solving trivial problems.
  • tchock23 6y ago
    Depends on what you’re trying to build. It’s pretty useful for generic CRUD apps, which is 90% of business apps when you strip out the marketing speak and design...
• 2ion 6y ago
  Would be a catastrophe because I haven't seen a no-code system that can successfully reproduce and elevate itself into a fungible foundation on which significant new technologies can be build --- like for example CPU microcode breathes life into the hardware and makes it execute all that assembly code, a simple concept which has produced trillions and trillions of economic value and is not just done yet. The leverage from the combination of engineering and the sciences we have in building computation and presentation systems has IMO not be used fully by a long way. Maybe we will go faster until we can elevate technology one level higher, but I don't see it coming just yet, where these so-called "no code platforms" could become the new microcode. This is complimentary to my observation that a huge mass of people have not yet overcome and probably will never overcome the stage of technology consumption as apposed to creation in their lifetimes. And can it really be called no-code if new technology could be encoded reliably at scale in that one higher level of technology?
• k__ 6y ago
  Low-code is a much better idea. Solutions like Access and Excel are "good enough" for 80% of the work, but the clunky coding integerations made the last 20% customization a real pain.
• Johnny555 6y ago
  Spreadsheets also brought in the "no-code" generation. Letting financial analysts do in-depth analysis without writing code or even understanding code at all. And it shows, logic errors abound in complicated spreadsheets and they often ignore corner cases. Even "no-coders" should have a working knowledge of basic programming logic so when things don't work as they should, you know where to start looking.
  • emteycz 6y ago
    Like there are no logic errors in code...
    • Johnny555 6y ago
      There are plenty of them, but obfuscating the logic behind multiple layers isn't going to make them easier to find.
  • _greim_ 6y ago
    So do you have to learn to code to gain these mental capabilities, or is there some more direct route?
• Khaine 6y ago
  When I was at university, one of our professors was really big on Executable UML (exUML)[1], where by using a subset of UML to model the problem, code would be automatically generated. Even back then it seemed like a dumb idea that was doomed to fail. Feels like it ideas like it keep coming back. For some reason, there isn't the same push in engineering. Can you imagine someone trying to sell the idea that anyone can design and build a bridge? Yet in software, we refuse to accept development as something that requires specialist skills. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML
  • tropdrop 6y ago
    No, I can't imagine someone trying to sell the idea that anyone can design and build a bridge. But a website is not a bridge – the stakes are low, and yes, for many basic use cases, Squarespace suffices as the intermediate that enables "anyone" to build a website. Actually, revisiting the bridge idea – for a sufficiently small creek, yes, anyone can design and build a bridge (simply chop a tree and fell it across). So I guess the question becomes – what kind of bridge are you asking for? A bridge designed to support large volumes of cars absolutely requires specialists, and those specialists should feel no fear from the companies that sell plywood to toss onto creeks.
    • Orou 6y ago
      Software has an increasingly large impact on people's lives - including their safety. Consider [ransom attacks on hospitals](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/hamstrung-by-ransomware-10-hospitals-are-turning-away-some-patients/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/hamst...) as just one example. Even ignoring bad actors, people have made billion-dollar mistakes in Excel (there was even a recent article about how contact-tracing data being handled in Excel was lost. That can lead to real deaths, too). No-code is great when it improves someone's ability to complete a task. Excel is still a great program, and learning VBA was my first introduction to programming. What isn't great is when companies lean on low/no-code solutions because they want to be cheap rather than do things properly.
    • Khaine 6y ago
• analog31 6y ago
  I've watched non-programmers get into the use of software tools for their jobs. From what I can tell, the main factor driving success is making the tools accessible, to the point where they don't have to be requested. This lowers the emotional barrier to entry. Folks don't have to justify it, and can use it for tasks that might even seem too trivial to discuss. I believe part of the success of Excel was simply that it was installed on every computer. Engineering students learned Matlab because it was "free" for their use thanks to generous site licenses. In fact, Matlab was an early no-code tool in a sense, allowing students to do calculations without learning FORTRAN. In my own workplace, a handful of people have gotten into using Python for trivial tasks because nobody could tell them No. They could even try it at home if they felt that it wasn't going to be approved at work.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Instead of getting away from code, why not try to make code simpler? Let the businesspeople write scripts in BASIC, and keep them away from the messy Python and JavaScript.
• bedobi 6y ago
  Taking a step back, I personally question why being able to code should be considered important? I'm a professional dev myself, but I don't see why everyone should have to, or feel like they have to, learn how to code, or even make stuff using "no-code". In general, kids and adults alike, but especially kids, should spend more time being active and outside, not sitting down in front of computer screens. Not everyone is cut out for or interested in coding, just like not everyone is cut out for or interested in medicine, law, a trade or literally every other imaginable field. And that's not a value judgement or a judgement of people's intelligence or lack thereof (unlike a lot of techies, I don't believe we're smarter than everyone else), it's just fact.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Taking a step back, I personally question why being able to code should be considered important? Ability to code gives you a particular mindset that makes it much easier for you to work with computer technologies. It's helpful, but on the other hand you could argue that all other technologies we use in daily life have been sufficiently abstracted away that you can get away with not knowing how they work. The real reason why coding is a big topic in society is that, for the past two or three decades, programming has been an easy way to move up one or two socioeconomical classes. Most well-paying fields are nowhere as easy in terms of workload or required education. Of course, if everyone became a programmer, the payoff wouldn't be as high anymore, but there's lots of money to be made right now by pointing to college dropouts made tech billionaires, or fat FAANG paychecks, and selling people coding bootcamps. (Or, in less cynical terms: the demand for software developers still outpaces supply; this manifests as a background social pressure to create more software developers.)
• connectsnk 6y ago
  I am neither a skeptic nor a believer. But I want to share this story that happened. In 2005 when I started my first job, our first project was building a case ticketing system. It took us 6 developers, 2 testers and 1 PM to deliver the first iteration of the project after 3 months. Those were the waterfall days. Recently I taught my wife how to write HTML. Last month she completed designing a pretty functional ticketing system working alone for 1 month on Microsoft Sharepoint. The system is complete with provisions for case escalations, teams / emails alerts, reports, groups etc.
• carldaddy 6y ago
  In my experience, the business users that are supposed to use the “no code” platforms give up and it goes back to the IT department to use.
• b20000 6y ago
  a bunch of fools running around in a company, creating shitty tools with wizards. we've seen it all before, and it will be the scientists and engineers who will have to clean it up and put out the fires, after they are long gone.
• marttt 6y ago
  A great 2006 essay on the other side of this coin is "Why Johnny Can't Code" by David Brin [1]. From the lead paragraph: "BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming." The author ended up buying a used Commodore 64 for his son. He touched this topic again in his blog in 2011 [2] (scroll to "encouraging kids to program"; he also participates in the comment section). I personally think single board computers seem to keep tinkering and line coding alive. 1: https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ 2: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/06/milestones-leading-up-to-good.html http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/06/milestones-leading-up-...
  • Ma8ee 6y ago
    It’s trivial to get started writing some Javascript in your browser. And you can do most things better than you used to be able to do with Basic.
• pabs3 6y ago
  I wonder what the effect of this no-code trend is going to be on the world of Open Source and Free Software.
• xxxxxxxx 6y ago
  As a counterpoint to this I hate it when data is treated like code. Need to create a new cost center? Raise a change request. Get an IP addressed added to a list in a firewall? CR. Bureaucracies thrive on this stuff. Even worse when master data is hardcoded into applications. It still happens especially when a vendor can make an ongoing revenue stream from it.
• blackrock 6y ago
  The code is not what is hard. It’s the logic and process flow that is hard. It’s the edge cases that bites you, because you didn’t account for it. The code is just the translation of your logic and process flows, into something that a compiler can understand, so that it can be reassembled into binary code. Regardless, these no-code tools will just add another layer, which will require some specialist to know how to use such tools.
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  Visual programming will only work in a very small subset of actual use cases. Just look at languages like LabView. Anything above a small sized program quickly devolves into a mess of shapes. Perhaps Visual programming can help out in creating building blocks of functionality, that depends on lower level abstractions and lower level code. Anything more than one level in VP is confusing.
• galaxyLogic 6y ago
  I think "no code" is a misguided project, a rebel without cause. The purpose of programming is to tell the computer what to do. To tell someone or something what to do you have to "talk to" them. You need some language to do that. And when you are talking to a computer, the languages they understand are called programming languages, in other words "code". Another way of looking at is that English is code as well. It is code we use to communicate with humans. Now maybe there is some visual language that could be used to communicate with a computer effectively, but then that is a language too, and thus is code. What "no-code" could ultimately be is a system where the computer asks you to choose from set of options and based on your choices incrementally generates a program, a bit like when you install Linux it asks you a set of questions, and you answer and in the end you have a working system which you created without talking in code, unless yes/no is considered a trivial (binary) code as well. But it is a very limited set of programs you can create that way in a limited time.
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  Our software is slow enough and the people who make it already removed enough from what's actually happening without espousing yet another level of abstraction which will make all of this worse. The idea we need so much software it's unrealistic to expect enough people to actually learn to write it we need visual tools to allow people without expertise to create it instead?
• kazinator 6y ago
  > There has been a proliferation of guides and online communities to teach kids how to build their own games and plugins for these platforms (Lua has never been so popular). Right, Lua. That's how much the "no code" generation is arriving? > In business today, it’s not enough to just open a spreadsheet and make some casual observations anymore. Using office applications is also "no code". Spreadsheets have some aspects of code in that there are formulas that use the value of other formulas, but it's not really code. "No code" arrived about forty years ago. With the advent of personal computers in the home and in offices, most computer use since then has been by non-coders. > [T]his new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services. And it’s all reproducible, as it is in technology and code and not produced by hand. Well, reproducible today, and maybe a week or two hence, until some details in the technology change. Invariably, the technology either has no regression tests which cover your use case, or else consciously declares your use case irrelevant. You know, they "prioritized" the software for "their best customers"; too bad that wasn't you! Since it's online SaaS, you can't even do the usual troubleshooting of comparing the behavior of the old and new version of a program. Between two refreshes of a browser, the black box can change what it is running. In prior decades, you might use some query language to scan a customer database to prioritize them according to "best", and export the results to some word processing mail merge to generate correspondence. All "no code". This article is really about shifts in the kinds of tools that no-coders are using, away from locally installed or in-house software toward SaaS.
• phanboy4 6y ago
  As with blockchain, there are more vendors and PR people trying to make "no-code" a thing than there are actual users or practitioners. Until that ratio shifts I'm skeptical.