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In my experience, these tools have another - counter intuitive and often overlooked - strength. Their limitations. You want to handle this very specific edge c
by niark 5y ago
In my experience, these tools have another - counter intuitive and often overlooked - strength. Their limitations.
You want to handle this very specific edge case? With code, there is certainly a way to do this. It may take days, it may add unreasonable complexity. Nevertheless, someone (yourself?) will ask that this kinda insignificant edge case is properly handled. And won’t take no for an answer.
With a (too) limited « no code » tool, maybe there really is no way to handle the edge case (or it would require code in a context that forbids it). Management (or yourself!) has no way to make someone fix this, and can just give up.
Soon enough, there is no problem. Finally, you can live with the unhandled edge case! Ok, you’ll just brief users. Ok they’ll learn by themselves that they shouldn’t do this.
So sometimes, « no code » tools can’t solve a problem. Then the problem simply disappear. It helps with finding a 80-20, something good enough. Everyone can be focused on more important stuff.
- bpicolo 5y agoYou may underestimate the ingenuity of non-developers hacking on no-code platforms. They end up thinking a lot more like developers than one might think. Our operations organization has independently arrived at some things pretty darn adjacent to more advanced software patterns, like circuit breakers. (This being for workflow automation no-code tooling, vs website builders). And a ton of real world work is getting done out there with Zapier, that's for sure.
- wvenable 5y agoI've seen a JSON parser written in a drag'n'drop visual no-code flowchart-like application that was very impressive and, if printed, would have caused the death of many trees. Utterly unmaintainable and horrifically stupid given any full-code solution would have involved using a pre-written library.
- ummwhat 5y agoBut then it's no longer no code. It's just a code environment for people who somehow got convinced "I could never learn to code".