3 ms·

For those who are skeptical of no-code/low-code, I am too, but here's perhaps a useful intuition pump / prompt for thought. Excel is a low-code tool backed by

For those who are skeptical of no-code/low-code, I am too, but here's perhaps a useful intuition pump / prompt for thought. Excel is a low-code tool backed by a scripting language for customization (VBA). There's no argument that this tool has enormous business value and is basically never, ever going away. So, what can't Excel do, and does it make sense for there to be another low-code tool that fills those niches? What's in the space between "can be done in Excel" and "must be done by professional software engineers"? Here are some tools I think fit the bill: Airtable, Alteryx, Looker... (I kind of hate Alteryx at my company but it's not the software's fault, it's the company being stingy with licenses which makes people's workflows harder to learn about)

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> (I kind of hate Alteryx at my company but it's not the software's fault, it's the company being stingy with licenses which makes people's workflows harder to learn about) This brings up a great counter-argument to visual programming tools, which is vendor lock-in. We talk about this a lot on the cloud architecture side, but surely this also becomes a concern if a commercial visual programming tool becomes an integral part of one's core business domain. And if the solution to this problem is some sort exportable code, then what's the point?
- civilized 5y ago
  I could be OK with it if it exported some crappy machine-generated SQL, which lots of other tools can do. But yes, when you use these tools you're at the mercy of the vendor and their willingness to play well with others. From a purely selfish perspective Alteryx is a disaster for me because I often need to see inside business process and Alteryx obstructs this more than other tools. But users swear by it so I have to grudgingly admit it's a "good" tool.

3 ms·

For those who are skeptical of no-code/low-code, I am too, but here's perhaps a useful intuition pump / prompt for thought. Excel is a low-code tool backed by

by civilized 5y ago

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> (I kind of hate Alteryx at my company but it's not the software's fault, it's the company being stingy with licenses which makes people's workflows harder to learn about) This brings up a great counter-argument to visual programming tools, which is vendor lock-in. We talk about this a lot on the cloud architecture side, but surely this also becomes a concern if a commercial visual programming tool becomes an integral part of one's core business domain. And if the solution to this problem is some sort exportable code, then what's the point?
- civilized 5y ago
  I could be OK with it if it exported some crappy machine-generated SQL, which lots of other tools can do. But yes, when you use these tools you're at the mercy of the vendor and their willingness to play well with others. From a purely selfish perspective Alteryx is a disaster for me because I often need to see inside business process and Alteryx obstructs this more than other tools. But users swear by it so I have to grudgingly admit it's a "good" tool.