16 ms·

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

ldiracdelta 5y ago
I went down a foolish path once of trying to create a simple flow-diagram -> code generator for the business people to use in order to do some basic logic with regard to email escalations. Got it done and ..... the logic was still hard for them. Oh well. Guess that's why we're paid well.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yeah maybe the point is that it isn't the actual code that's hard, it's the thinking. Like, you wouldn't try to make a no-equations maths system. It's not writing down e=mc² that's hard, it's figuring out that's what you want. That said it's still way too hard to make web apps the "proper" way. I think there's space for something easier but I bet it will look more like Mathematica than LabVIEW.
pm90 5y ago
That’s when they hire “yes-code” people to simplify their setup. Snark aside though; do whatever floats your boat. Tools that allow non technical folks to start building useful products is still a win (even if I personally wouldn’t make that tradeoff).
brundolf 5y ago
I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing their path when they try to brew install a different version of Python and the only way forward is to go learn what "chmod" is Repl.it and peers seem to be on the right track here
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such. Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.
  - breck 5y ago
    GitPod.io I was waiting for something like this for years, it’s great.
    - ghuntley 5y ago
      <3 from the Gitpod team. Yes, indeed condensing CONTRIBUTING.md into a Dockerfile and then offering a single URL to "get ready to code/contribute fixes" from any device, anywhere is exactly what Gitpod is all about. Try it out https://Gitpod.io#https://GitHub.com/gitpod-io/website https://Gitpod.io#https://GitHub.com/gitpod-io/website PS. If you aren't impressed by a JavaScript app then take Kubernetes for a spin! https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-k3s https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-k3s :-)
      - gavinray 5y ago
        Seconding Gitpod, I really wish every repo would take the couple of seconds (to minutes, depending on how complicated) to just create the Docker config for developing it. I use VS Code devcontainers a lot locally, and it's the same concept. This really ought to be something we aspire to as a standard IMO. I've submitted several Gitpod + VS Code Devcontainer setup PR's to projects to spare others the pain of having to figure it out.
      - pnt12 5y ago
        Sounds great, I will definitely try it! One of the latest OSS projects I checked required gcloud and some online account to run make, it wad absurd...
    - 5y ago
motoxpro 5y ago
I think the problem is that you don't need a "mature" product to make millions of dollars. It's similar to Shopify, I can put up a store in ~20 mins and start selling immediately. I would be extremely misguided to try to "build an platform" when that problem has already been solved. Same with no-code. Why code it from scratch when it's been solved already? If you want to go super deep, sure. Seems like the hate comes from a cross of not-invented-here syndrome crossed with only 10 billion dollar companies in 2 years are cool. Here's an example of a Bubble biz. https://goodgigs.app/ https://goodgigs.app/
- layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
  Lol, works as expected: “Your browser was unable to load some necessary resources, contact your IT network administrator and ask them to allow access to dhtiece9044ep.cloudfront.net dd7tel2830j4w.cloudfront.net/ d1muf25xaso8hp.cloudfront.net”
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    I'm not affiliated with either site. Just thought it was cool. I don't think one could argue that building an MVP/SMB on a platform is more buggy than a 1-2 man shop building from scratch, though. At least not in the same amount of time.
- andrewingram 5y ago
  The problem here is that if Bubble gets _huge_ before solving the very obvious performance problems, the web is going to be in an even worse place than it is today. That Goodgigs site has a first load weight of over 5mb, when it could really be done in much less. I truly appreciate the problem these platforms are trying to solve, but they're just not there yet. I wouldn't say it's easy to build a no-code platform, but it's much easier without the constraint of needing the output to have good performance - that's the hard part.
jimmy2020 5y ago
reading your comment and thinking of Wix
rattray 5y ago
I'd be curious to hear from someone who's built a truly complicated app with bubble (equivalent of >50k loc not just crud). I can't think of a reason it'd be impossible to build a no-code app that scales as well as code, and I don't have evidence that Bubble has failed.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  I worked on a Bubble app that definitely hit the limits of how big apps should be. The work flow box things still give me nightmares. It's very hard to figure out the order things were executing, and we had to resort to A LOT of JavaScript blocks to break out of the normal workflow to get features working that weren't achievable with the built-in tools. If felt like there was a missing level of abstraction - everything was too intertwined. Making changes to anything becomes harrowing once the app becomes large - it was slow, and you don't know which UI elements are being accessed by any blocks - so it's really easy to break things without realizing. And the undo system gives you no visual clue as to what is being undo-d if it was in a different view. It was the most fragile system I've worked on. However, many of those issues could be fixed, improved, or redesigned. If you were doing "regular" use-case stuff it was... fun! Our designer could get in and implement/test things really easily. My gut feeling is that there could be system that scales well - but the escape hatches need to be reliable when you hit the edges.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  What if you are just building a generic CRUD app?
mrspeaker 5y ago
It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubble they were using that would be a pain to write or integrate. The rewrite would take some time. Instead we launched with the Bubble app as it was. It targeted a niche market, and that market came flooding in - it really proved there was demand for the product and the feedback helped shape the end result - months ahead of where would have been if I re-wrote it. But as the app grew we ended up with "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles (that we had no control over)... but again, it was good enough to launch with and validate the company, and it was fast to try out ideas. We eventually did a full rewrite once we were happy with the overall structure of the app, but the process changed my perspective on the value of no-code tools in the right hands.
- jcheng 5y ago
  Thank you for a strikingly helpful testimonial. I’m skeptical of no- and low-code but based on your account, I’m now intrigued enough to give bubble a look.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ramraj07 5y ago
  People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s something in your brain that needs to click to write code? Anyways I’d much rather trust a product created by a team described in this comment than one written by a pure group of engineers.
yuvalhazaz 5y ago
We try to solve precisely that with Amplication, where we combine low-code with custom code. We generate a node.js and react application based on low-code configuration and push the code to your GitHub repo https://github.com/amplication/amplication https://github.com/amplication/amplication
quickthrower2 5y ago
I hope with $100m they can solve this. I think the only way to solve this is to hard-code so many different use cases into the gallery of controls, workflows and repeaters etc. that anything you dream of is easy to build. They also need to invest heavily into UX and the ease of figuring out how to do something. I've used Bubble and similar tools, and they share something in common with coding - you need to watch/read a bunch of tutorials to figure out how to do what you need. What they save is an initial headache of devops / authentication / wrangling which is bad enough as a programmer but extra hard for a non programmer to contend with. Here is another idea for someone - a yes-code tool that lets you write everything in code, but handles devops/authentication and some common stuff for you. Basically Heroku + some NodeJS starter kit that is meticulously kept up to date.
- zingar 5y ago
  Suspenders is what you describe for Rails. It bakes in lots of opinions, obviously, but the idea is that you can go to production with this code by pushing it to your heroku repo.
- fakedang 5y ago
  Exactly. I had my tries with a few code builders, and soon enough I realized that it's often better (and sometimes faster) to simply learn how to code. Most code builders don't even give the devops/authentication bits.
- random_kris 5y ago
  To me java spring boot is a yes code platoform. There is library basically for anything you can think of. Out of the box you get all the batteries you need
redisman 5y ago
It's frustrating. Especially now that I'm nearing 15 years as a professional coder, I already spend less and less time typing and more thinking and working on different views on the problem. Typing or reading text is not difficult!
- lionkor 5y ago
  This touches on the real issue here -- the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text. Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic, since there are millions of people wo do nothing else but read text-code all day, me included. All you do with no-code programming is outsourcing writing the actual code to some other company, who already did all the work for you, and you just plug it together. To me, that doesn't reduce complexity, or mental load, it just offloads it to someone else. There's no "no-code" here, they just let you use the code they engineered.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    > Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic Math used to be written in prose. Arguably symbols are better. I think feedback systems are a good example of where diagrams are nice.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    > the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text One advantage of diagrammatic/block/flow-based programming is that it lets the programmer avoid fiddly syntax. Many experienced programmers have internalized this to the point that it barely registers as a concern except when learning a new language, but for novices doing things like correctly using tags/brackets/semicolons often lead to more failure and frustration than correctly implementing "hard" concepts like recursion. For examples, check out the Alice project's papers from Dann, Cooper, Pausch, et al.
lucasverra 5y ago
Simply not true. I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating. In the past i’ve built a webapp that : - Renders desktop - Renders mobile - store in database - after a conditional form - create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form - connects to an external system with cron daily - sends email daily from backend - uses plugins from community - much more The deal with bubble is : - resources cutting 10X - if you manage to understand the adequate scope (serving up to multiple thousands) with no such fancy ui, with not blazing extreme loading perf (since no focus on static) Bubble is : - Build 10x faster a custom ish layout with custom logic to get your first 10k users. (NPM available if you code) Does it scale to infinity? No Will you need code after that. Most probably. But you got there with 10x less ressources
- kfk 5y ago
  Most of the time I spend with devs is figuring out objects and their respective data models. Low code is great but it sure doesn’t save 10x on resources, not for me at least.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Your approach requires learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Rails documentation in order to create a prototype. You may as well be saying that getting furniture from IKEA isn't any simpler than buying lumber, saws, wax and paint from Home Depot and building your own.
    - rorykoehler 5y ago
imvetri 5y ago
No there is no problem with no code approach for a recursive design. It will scale flawlessly. If amount of time to learn is the problem, they will come with a better design that will be smooth for a user to build. its a UX problem not entire product's problem.
zamalek 5y ago
My issue with no-code/low-code is that it puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the developer before the user. When you look at the amount of time spent staring at a screen, your users spend way more time (person-hours) looking at your app than you do coding it. Why all this focus on what is arguably the least important actor in the system?
- minitoar 5y ago
  Perhaps this is obvious but the answer is: cost. Developers are expensive. Delivering a viable poc cheaper, sooner, even if you end up having to redo it all anyway, can be an excellent trade off.
  - ActionHank 5y ago
    Wonder if there will be similar businesses and freelancers who will start to specialize in the migration from no-code to code in the same way that there are for on-prem to cloud.
tluyben2 5y ago
Well, learning how to code is not the only issue. Tooling installation, deployment etc is, at least for me, even after having written code for almost 40 years, a huge annoyance. I want to think about problems and logic; I couldn't care less about what editor I use or any of that and I care even less how it's deployed. As long as it's up and fast, I don't care. And this is still not that simple still, after all these cloud advancements to do except for the most trivial cases (static-ish websites).
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is why we vertically integrated most of our tool chain. Deploying our software involves emailing a customer a link to a zip file or importing a json configuration file for them in a web portal. A vast majority of our day is spent focusing on the business end.
jacquesm 5y ago
Clearly you haven't actually used any of these tools or you likely would not have written it. I've worked with '4G' since Mimer, Mapper and all kinds of other contenders and until a few years ago (roughly until 'Mendix') low code / no code was a limiting environment. But Mendix got it right and there are plenty of valid domains of application for the current crop. Plenty of success stories of companies that used it as RAD and validation tool. Once the money rolls in you can always do a rewrite, it is much easier to do that when you are successful then to try to find success on a platform that is slower to develop for. Like every other tool: use where appropriate, there are plenty of domains where this approach would not work.
eastendguy 5y ago
"Low code" tools like Sikuli, Selenium IDE, UIPath or UI Vision are often used for test and process automation. They work well and have their place. Could you do everything with pure Python or C++? Sure, but it would be much slower. Low code is useful if your need is not covered by an available application, and on the other hand you lack the resources and/or time to develop an app from scratch. But I fully agree that "No-code" is a marketing term only. Even the easiest "No-code" app requires a good understanding of concepts like "if/then". The term "Low-code" is more honest.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
How does it work for Excel?
- dmix 5y ago
  Probably Google Sheets since it’s web based with API oriented integrations.
onion2k 5y ago
You can rephrase what you said as "This approach is better for low complexity apps", and in my experience, that's probably 80% of what businesses need.
goto11 5y ago
Yes but most problems are simple. It also happen that Excel-sheets become too complex for their own good, but most excel sheets are pretty simple and never grow to that level of complexity. So if you don't know if a particular task will grow to that level of complexity, it is probably better use of resources to use a nocode/lowcode solution until it is clearly insufficient, and then take the pain of migrating to code.
paou 5y ago
I think regardless of whether what you say is correct or not - there is another benefit you are missing, the same one that Unity brought to game development - i.e. removing the developer as the bottleneck / gatekeeper for making changes - lost count of how many times our designer has created tickets to just update small styling things, or our PO wants wording or small flow changes. A tool that solves this at scale for teams will be worth it's weight in gold. #fulldisclosure am CTO of HarmonyCB - this is exactly what we are trying to achieve. Rightly or wrongly we still use a nocode moniker though, as it explains the area of work to non-tech people rather well.
drewdog75 5y ago
I find the data modeling portion of Bubble to be very intuitive. Some of the UI configuration is also intuitive. The responsiveness of the solutions built W Bubble is lacking.
treespace88 5y ago
I need to checkout some of these low / no code tools to see if anything is new since I last checked. In the past I have found that as soon as a server push action is required things break down pretty fast. IE display alert at a certain time but not if the user has focus in a text field. Show an message indicator instead.
strogonoff 5y ago
I (possibly wrongly) apply the reverse of the “$100 note on the ground” parable to no-code tools. If a toolchain that allows to deliver fully functional software of appropriate complexity without writing code was even remotely feasible, Apple/Microsoft/Google would have already been pushing hard each for their own take on it. Considering the immense upside for whomever of the big tech that manages to do it first, and that they can throw much more resources at it than the best-valued SV unicorn, presumably they’ve tried (probably more times than we know); and presumably what they’ve found is that at a level of no-code tool sophistication where it’s good enough it becomes indistinguishable from programming—so they’re trying to attract more people into software engineering instead.
tootie 5y ago
My read is that there is a big unmet need is small line of business apps. Things that are currently managed with awkward email/spreadsheet workflows that aren't worth an investment in custom development. No-code apps can automate these with much less cost and time. This will overlap a bit with what's currently being done by teams of specialists but it will mostly be a new market niche. That may change in a few years though.

ldiracdelta 5y ago

I went down a foolish path once of trying to create a simple flow-diagram -> code generator for the business people to use in order to do some basic logic with regard to email escalations. Got it done and ..... the logic was still hard for them. Oh well. Guess that's why we're paid well.

IshKebab 5y ago
Yeah maybe the point is that it isn't the actual code that's hard, it's the thinking. Like, you wouldn't try to make a no-equations maths system. It's not writing down e=mc² that's hard, it's figuring out that's what you want. That said it's still way too hard to make web apps the "proper" way. I think there's space for something easier but I bet it will look more like Mathematica than LabVIEW.

pm90 5y ago

That’s when they hire “yes-code” people to simplify their setup. Snark aside though; do whatever floats your boat. Tools that allow non technical folks to start building useful products is still a win (even if I personally wouldn’t make that tradeoff).

brundolf 5y ago

I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing their path when they try to brew install a different version of Python and the only way forward is to go learn what "chmod" is Repl.it and peers seem to be on the right track here

_carbyau_ 5y ago
I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such. Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.
- breck 5y ago
  GitPod.io I was waiting for something like this for years, it’s great.
  - ghuntley 5y ago
    <3 from the Gitpod team. Yes, indeed condensing CONTRIBUTING.md into a Dockerfile and then offering a single URL to "get ready to code/contribute fixes" from any device, anywhere is exactly what Gitpod is all about. Try it out https://Gitpod.io#https://GitHub.com/gitpod-io/website https://Gitpod.io#https://GitHub.com/gitpod-io/website PS. If you aren't impressed by a JavaScript app then take Kubernetes for a spin! https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-k3s https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-k3s :-)
    - gavinray 5y ago
      Seconding Gitpod, I really wish every repo would take the couple of seconds (to minutes, depending on how complicated) to just create the Docker config for developing it. I use VS Code devcontainers a lot locally, and it's the same concept. This really ought to be something we aspire to as a standard IMO. I've submitted several Gitpod + VS Code Devcontainer setup PR's to projects to spare others the pain of having to figure it out.
    - pnt12 5y ago
      Sounds great, I will definitely try it! One of the latest OSS projects I checked required gcloud and some online account to run make, it wad absurd...
  - 5y ago

motoxpro 5y ago

I think the problem is that you don't need a "mature" product to make millions of dollars. It's similar to Shopify, I can put up a store in ~20 mins and start selling immediately. I would be extremely misguided to try to "build an platform" when that problem has already been solved. Same with no-code. Why code it from scratch when it's been solved already? If you want to go super deep, sure. Seems like the hate comes from a cross of not-invented-here syndrome crossed with only 10 billion dollar companies in 2 years are cool. Here's an example of a Bubble biz. https://goodgigs.app/ https://goodgigs.app/

layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
Lol, works as expected: “Your browser was unable to load some necessary resources, contact your IT network administrator and ask them to allow access to dhtiece9044ep.cloudfront.net dd7tel2830j4w.cloudfront.net/ d1muf25xaso8hp.cloudfront.net”
- motoxpro 5y ago
  I'm not affiliated with either site. Just thought it was cool. I don't think one could argue that building an MVP/SMB on a platform is more buggy than a 1-2 man shop building from scratch, though. At least not in the same amount of time.
andrewingram 5y ago
The problem here is that if Bubble gets _huge_ before solving the very obvious performance problems, the web is going to be in an even worse place than it is today. That Goodgigs site has a first load weight of over 5mb, when it could really be done in much less. I truly appreciate the problem these platforms are trying to solve, but they're just not there yet. I wouldn't say it's easy to build a no-code platform, but it's much easier without the constraint of needing the output to have good performance - that's the hard part.

jimmy2020 5y ago

reading your comment and thinking of Wix

rattray 5y ago

I'd be curious to hear from someone who's built a truly complicated app with bubble (equivalent of >50k loc not just crud). I can't think of a reason it'd be impossible to build a no-code app that scales as well as code, and I don't have evidence that Bubble has failed.

mrspeaker 5y ago
I worked on a Bubble app that definitely hit the limits of how big apps should be. The work flow box things still give me nightmares. It's very hard to figure out the order things were executing, and we had to resort to A LOT of JavaScript blocks to break out of the normal workflow to get features working that weren't achievable with the built-in tools. If felt like there was a missing level of abstraction - everything was too intertwined. Making changes to anything becomes harrowing once the app becomes large - it was slow, and you don't know which UI elements are being accessed by any blocks - so it's really easy to break things without realizing. And the undo system gives you no visual clue as to what is being undo-d if it was in a different view. It was the most fragile system I've worked on. However, many of those issues could be fixed, improved, or redesigned. If you were doing "regular" use-case stuff it was... fun! Our designer could get in and implement/test things really easily. My gut feeling is that there could be system that scales well - but the escape hatches need to be reliable when you hit the edges.
foxpurple 5y ago
What if you are just building a generic CRUD app?

mrspeaker 5y ago

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubble they were using that would be a pain to write or integrate. The rewrite would take some time. Instead we launched with the Bubble app as it was. It targeted a niche market, and that market came flooding in - it really proved there was demand for the product and the feedback helped shape the end result - months ahead of where would have been if I re-wrote it. But as the app grew we ended up with "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles (that we had no control over)... but again, it was good enough to launch with and validate the company, and it was fast to try out ideas. We eventually did a full rewrite once we were happy with the overall structure of the app, but the process changed my perspective on the value of no-code tools in the right hands.

jcheng 5y ago
Thank you for a strikingly helpful testimonial. I’m skeptical of no- and low-code but based on your account, I’m now intrigued enough to give bubble a look.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ramraj07 5y ago
People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s something in your brain that needs to click to write code? Anyways I’d much rather trust a product created by a team described in this comment than one written by a pure group of engineers.

yuvalhazaz 5y ago

We try to solve precisely that with Amplication, where we combine low-code with custom code. We generate a node.js and react application based on low-code configuration and push the code to your GitHub repo https://github.com/amplication/amplication https://github.com/amplication/amplication

quickthrower2 5y ago

I hope with $100m they can solve this. I think the only way to solve this is to hard-code so many different use cases into the gallery of controls, workflows and repeaters etc. that anything you dream of is easy to build. They also need to invest heavily into UX and the ease of figuring out how to do something. I've used Bubble and similar tools, and they share something in common with coding - you need to watch/read a bunch of tutorials to figure out how to do what you need. What they save is an initial headache of devops / authentication / wrangling which is bad enough as a programmer but extra hard for a non programmer to contend with. Here is another idea for someone - a yes-code tool that lets you write everything in code, but handles devops/authentication and some common stuff for you. Basically Heroku + some NodeJS starter kit that is meticulously kept up to date.

zingar 5y ago
Suspenders is what you describe for Rails. It bakes in lots of opinions, obviously, but the idea is that you can go to production with this code by pushing it to your heroku repo.
fakedang 5y ago
Exactly. I had my tries with a few code builders, and soon enough I realized that it's often better (and sometimes faster) to simply learn how to code. Most code builders don't even give the devops/authentication bits.
random_kris 5y ago
To me java spring boot is a yes code platoform. There is library basically for anything you can think of. Out of the box you get all the batteries you need

redisman 5y ago

It's frustrating. Especially now that I'm nearing 15 years as a professional coder, I already spend less and less time typing and more thinking and working on different views on the problem. Typing or reading text is not difficult!

lionkor 5y ago
This touches on the real issue here -- the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text. Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic, since there are millions of people wo do nothing else but read text-code all day, me included. All you do with no-code programming is outsourcing writing the actual code to some other company, who already did all the work for you, and you just plug it together. To me, that doesn't reduce complexity, or mental load, it just offloads it to someone else. There's no "no-code" here, they just let you use the code they engineered.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic Math used to be written in prose. Arguably symbols are better. I think feedback systems are a good example of where diagrams are nice.
- asoneth 5y ago
  > the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text One advantage of diagrammatic/block/flow-based programming is that it lets the programmer avoid fiddly syntax. Many experienced programmers have internalized this to the point that it barely registers as a concern except when learning a new language, but for novices doing things like correctly using tags/brackets/semicolons often lead to more failure and frustration than correctly implementing "hard" concepts like recursion. For examples, check out the Alice project's papers from Dann, Cooper, Pausch, et al.

lucasverra 5y ago

Simply not true. I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating. In the past i’ve built a webapp that : - Renders desktop - Renders mobile - store in database - after a conditional form - create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form - connects to an external system with cron daily - sends email daily from backend - uses plugins from community - much more The deal with bubble is : - resources cutting 10X - if you manage to understand the adequate scope (serving up to multiple thousands) with no such fancy ui, with not blazing extreme loading perf (since no focus on static) Bubble is : - Build 10x faster a custom ish layout with custom logic to get your first 10k users. (NPM available if you code) Does it scale to infinity? No Will you need code after that. Most probably. But you got there with 10x less ressources

kfk 5y ago
Most of the time I spend with devs is figuring out objects and their respective data models. Low code is great but it sure doesn’t save 10x on resources, not for me at least.
rorykoehler 5y ago
I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Your approach requires learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Rails documentation in order to create a prototype. You may as well be saying that getting furniture from IKEA isn't any simpler than buying lumber, saws, wax and paint from Home Depot and building your own.
  - rorykoehler 5y ago

imvetri 5y ago

No there is no problem with no code approach for a recursive design. It will scale flawlessly. If amount of time to learn is the problem, they will come with a better design that will be smooth for a user to build. its a UX problem not entire product's problem.

zamalek 5y ago

My issue with no-code/low-code is that it puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the developer before the user. When you look at the amount of time spent staring at a screen, your users spend way more time (person-hours) looking at your app than you do coding it. Why all this focus on what is arguably the least important actor in the system?

minitoar 5y ago
Perhaps this is obvious but the answer is: cost. Developers are expensive. Delivering a viable poc cheaper, sooner, even if you end up having to redo it all anyway, can be an excellent trade off.
- ActionHank 5y ago
  Wonder if there will be similar businesses and freelancers who will start to specialize in the migration from no-code to code in the same way that there are for on-prem to cloud.

tluyben2 5y ago

Well, learning how to code is not the only issue. Tooling installation, deployment etc is, at least for me, even after having written code for almost 40 years, a huge annoyance. I want to think about problems and logic; I couldn't care less about what editor I use or any of that and I care even less how it's deployed. As long as it's up and fast, I don't care. And this is still not that simple still, after all these cloud advancements to do except for the most trivial cases (static-ish websites).

bob1029 5y ago
This is why we vertically integrated most of our tool chain. Deploying our software involves emailing a customer a link to a zip file or importing a json configuration file for them in a web portal. A vast majority of our day is spent focusing on the business end.

jacquesm 5y ago

Clearly you haven't actually used any of these tools or you likely would not have written it. I've worked with '4G' since Mimer, Mapper and all kinds of other contenders and until a few years ago (roughly until 'Mendix') low code / no code was a limiting environment. But Mendix got it right and there are plenty of valid domains of application for the current crop. Plenty of success stories of companies that used it as RAD and validation tool. Once the money rolls in you can always do a rewrite, it is much easier to do that when you are successful then to try to find success on a platform that is slower to develop for. Like every other tool: use where appropriate, there are plenty of domains where this approach would not work.

eastendguy 5y ago

"Low code" tools like Sikuli, Selenium IDE, UIPath or UI Vision are often used for test and process automation. They work well and have their place. Could you do everything with pure Python or C++? Sure, but it would be much slower. Low code is useful if your need is not covered by an available application, and on the other hand you lack the resources and/or time to develop an app from scratch. But I fully agree that "No-code" is a marketing term only. Even the easiest "No-code" app requires a good understanding of concepts like "if/then". The term "Low-code" is more honest.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

How does it work for Excel?

dmix 5y ago
Probably Google Sheets since it’s web based with API oriented integrations.

onion2k 5y ago

You can rephrase what you said as "This approach is better for low complexity apps", and in my experience, that's probably 80% of what businesses need.

goto11 5y ago

Yes but most problems are simple. It also happen that Excel-sheets become too complex for their own good, but most excel sheets are pretty simple and never grow to that level of complexity. So if you don't know if a particular task will grow to that level of complexity, it is probably better use of resources to use a nocode/lowcode solution until it is clearly insufficient, and then take the pain of migrating to code.

paou 5y ago

I think regardless of whether what you say is correct or not - there is another benefit you are missing, the same one that Unity brought to game development - i.e. removing the developer as the bottleneck / gatekeeper for making changes - lost count of how many times our designer has created tickets to just update small styling things, or our PO wants wording or small flow changes. A tool that solves this at scale for teams will be worth it's weight in gold. #fulldisclosure am CTO of HarmonyCB - this is exactly what we are trying to achieve. Rightly or wrongly we still use a nocode moniker though, as it explains the area of work to non-tech people rather well.

drewdog75 5y ago

I find the data modeling portion of Bubble to be very intuitive. Some of the UI configuration is also intuitive. The responsiveness of the solutions built W Bubble is lacking.

treespace88 5y ago

I need to checkout some of these low / no code tools to see if anything is new since I last checked. In the past I have found that as soon as a server push action is required things break down pretty fast. IE display alert at a certain time but not if the user has focus in a text field. Show an message indicator instead.

strogonoff 5y ago

I (possibly wrongly) apply the reverse of the “$100 note on the ground” parable to no-code tools. If a toolchain that allows to deliver fully functional software of appropriate complexity without writing code was even remotely feasible, Apple/Microsoft/Google would have already been pushing hard each for their own take on it. Considering the immense upside for whomever of the big tech that manages to do it first, and that they can throw much more resources at it than the best-valued SV unicorn, presumably they’ve tried (probably more times than we know); and presumably what they’ve found is that at a level of no-code tool sophistication where it’s good enough it becomes indistinguishable from programming—so they’re trying to attract more people into software engineering instead.

tootie 5y ago

My read is that there is a big unmet need is small line of business apps. Things that are currently managed with awkward email/spreadsheet workflows that aren't worth an investment in custom development. No-code apps can automate these with much less cost and time. This will overlap a bit with what's currently being done by teams of specialists but it will mostly be a new market niche. That may change in a few years though.