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> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? It's a basic error of attribution. We need comple

> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? It's a basic error of attribution. We need complex systems, and we build them typically by text source, which is the most efficient way of coding a system (as we've found over the decades). Because the source looks arcane to an untrained eye, people attribute the complexity to the form of the code: text source, and not to the nature of the systems being built, which have some natural level of complexity. Hence we try to alter the source form in some visual "friendly" way and believe we've achieved further simplicity. Demos looks attractive by connecting 3-4 high-level blocks together that make milkshake, or whatever. In real world projects, using these visual systems end up even more complex and much less flexible than text source. Rinse and repeat.

goto11 5y ago
I remember similar sentiments among geeks when GUI's became more commonplace compared to command line interfaces like DOS. But the reality is that for the majority of people using a GUI is much easier than a text based interface. A full-blown general purpose text-based programming language is of course always more powerful, but a task-specific GUI can be much more efficient for the particular tasks they are designed for.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  The people calling no-code useless are the same ones who think Excel is useless. It isn’t a tool for them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  Command-line interface isn't simply text, it's a conversational UI. People who claimed GUI lost something were right, and that's why what was lost keeps coming back and it's still with us. Google Search, Siri / Google Assistant, and the prompts in almost any video/graphics/3D-modeling software or other professional packages, not to mention the recent craze in "chat bots", all of those are essentially CLI reborn.
gilbetron 5y ago
This is an excellent comment, I love how you phrase it. I've had people (even on HN) get angry at me when I suggest that we do have a wonderful visual/graphical was to write software: text. Text is a graphical representation of ideas. One that, as you point out, has been honed over hundreds of years for expressing ideas, and decades for expressing code. Text is so amazingly intuitive that don't even think of it as graphical, but it is. As you also point out, the reason it looks complex is because software is complex.
- cloverich 5y ago
  Text also has the best tooling around change management. Every developer I interview these days knows how to use source control, do diffs and code review, use local / staging / production environments and do rollbacks and hotfixes (etc etc). Sometimes the allure of these no code platforms in solving some important problems overlooks that even if they can do that well, they _also_ need to be just as good as change management, and likely the person building said app needs to understand all these concepts well.

goto11 5y ago

I remember similar sentiments among geeks when GUI's became more commonplace compared to command line interfaces like DOS. But the reality is that for the majority of people using a GUI is much easier than a text based interface. A full-blown general purpose text-based programming language is of course always more powerful, but a task-specific GUI can be much more efficient for the particular tasks they are designed for.

long_time_gone 5y ago
The people calling no-code useless are the same ones who think Excel is useless. It isn’t a tool for them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yourenotsmart 5y ago
Command-line interface isn't simply text, it's a conversational UI. People who claimed GUI lost something were right, and that's why what was lost keeps coming back and it's still with us. Google Search, Siri / Google Assistant, and the prompts in almost any video/graphics/3D-modeling software or other professional packages, not to mention the recent craze in "chat bots", all of those are essentially CLI reborn.

gilbetron 5y ago

This is an excellent comment, I love how you phrase it. I've had people (even on HN) get angry at me when I suggest that we do have a wonderful visual/graphical was to write software: text. Text is a graphical representation of ideas. One that, as you point out, has been honed over hundreds of years for expressing ideas, and decades for expressing code. Text is so amazingly intuitive that don't even think of it as graphical, but it is. As you also point out, the reason it looks complex is because software is complex.

cloverich 5y ago
Text also has the best tooling around change management. Every developer I interview these days knows how to use source control, do diffs and code review, use local / staging / production environments and do rollbacks and hotfixes (etc etc). Sometimes the allure of these no code platforms in solving some important problems overlooks that even if they can do that well, they _also_ need to be just as good as change management, and likely the person building said app needs to understand all these concepts well.