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well, you made me (try) to read the article to confirm you didn't get it, but i can only see two paragraphs. still, it seems that was enough to see it isn't abo

well, you made me (try) to read the article to confirm you didn't get it, but i can only see two paragraphs. still, it seems that was enough to see it isn't about making software that others will pay for, but about avoiding paying a pro to make software when a novice can sling something good enough together. someone with another job doesn't need to make software someone will pay money for. their real job is how they make a living. but they can write software to do their job better or easier. code isn't basketball, it's duck tape. people other than duck tape specialists can make use of it.

dmitrygr 5y ago
> code isn't basketball, it's duck tape. And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  hate to break it to you, that mess was made by the duck tape specialists.
- danShumway 5y ago
  "Our stuff made by professionals is also terrible" is maybe not the slam-dunk argument against democratizing code that people think it is. I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being written to get around some half-thought, bad UX we professionals foisted on them in the first place? We build restrictive apps and bad workflows that make it harder for them to do their jobs, and then we have the gall to say that they're not professional enough or predisposed enough to a certain kind of thinking to write their own code? Give those non-programmers some degree of access to a world where computers are creative tools that can be commanded, not just single-purpose devices that do pre-specified things. Because that world is great, and they should have access to it regardless of whether or not they're good at programming. And it's not like the modern software industry is so wildly quality-controlled right now that we're in any position to tell anyone that they're not good enough or thoughtful enough to deserve having more agency over the tools they use.
  - agent86 5y ago
    Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving. Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry. But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways. Some horrible workflow for a small department that functions by manually juggling 3 spreadsheets may not rise to the level of an IT provided solution being created, but with the proper tooling the non-programmers can create a better solution than what currently exists.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      Exactly. And in a lot ways this is something of an Open Source/hacker mantra: that people shouldn't have to ask permission from a bunch of gatekeepers to solve their own software problems, particularly when no one else is interested in solving them. Part of the narrative of hacker culture is a bunch of hobbyists looking at established businesses or processes that aren't addressing their needs and saying, "well heck you, I don't need your validation, I'm going to build software that accomplishes my goals and I don't care if you think it looks professional or not and I don't care if it scales to whatever tech stack or business that you think it needs to." There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.

dmitrygr 5y ago

> code isn't basketball, it's duck tape. And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...

pasquinelli 5y ago
hate to break it to you, that mess was made by the duck tape specialists.
danShumway 5y ago
"Our stuff made by professionals is also terrible" is maybe not the slam-dunk argument against democratizing code that people think it is. I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being written to get around some half-thought, bad UX we professionals foisted on them in the first place? We build restrictive apps and bad workflows that make it harder for them to do their jobs, and then we have the gall to say that they're not professional enough or predisposed enough to a certain kind of thinking to write their own code? Give those non-programmers some degree of access to a world where computers are creative tools that can be commanded, not just single-purpose devices that do pre-specified things. Because that world is great, and they should have access to it regardless of whether or not they're good at programming. And it's not like the modern software industry is so wildly quality-controlled right now that we're in any position to tell anyone that they're not good enough or thoughtful enough to deserve having more agency over the tools they use.
- agent86 5y ago
  Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving. Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry. But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways. Some horrible workflow for a small department that functions by manually juggling 3 spreadsheets may not rise to the level of an IT provided solution being created, but with the proper tooling the non-programmers can create a better solution than what currently exists.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Exactly. And in a lot ways this is something of an Open Source/hacker mantra: that people shouldn't have to ask permission from a bunch of gatekeepers to solve their own software problems, particularly when no one else is interested in solving them. Part of the narrative of hacker culture is a bunch of hobbyists looking at established businesses or processes that aren't addressing their needs and saying, "well heck you, I don't need your validation, I'm going to build software that accomplishes my goals and I don't care if you think it looks professional or not and I don't care if it scales to whatever tech stack or business that you think it needs to." There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.