4 ms·

IMO, the problem is that many of those tools are really not that reliable in the sense that they may go away soon. It all takes a company to be acquired by M$,

IMO, the problem is that many of those tools are really not that reliable in the sense that they may go away soon. It all takes a company to be acquired by M$, GOOG etc and then taken offline. For example, I lived through Google Appmaker (absolutely fantastic!) which was retired with 6 months notice. It's really risky to build larger app on no-code platforms that you don't fully control via self-hosting. And I don't know great open-source/open-core low/no-code stacks that are easy to use and expressive enough. It would be great to get pointers. I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar.

blowski 5y ago
Sounds like you're worried about what happens if you embed and tightly couple a lot of your business logic to something you don't have full control over? That's a totally valid concern, and probably one of the reasons we've tended to move away from these tools and towards doing everything in stable programming languages. It's a classic set of trade-offs - quality, features, stability, security, price. There are lots of solutions on the market offering one configuration of those trade-offs. If it existed today, some people would push for HyperCard to support mobile apps, multi-user access, web-based and native apps, all of which would make the solution 'worse" for others.
- danielheath 5y ago
  There’s nothing inherent about low-code that requires it to be tied to hosting provided by a specific entity which can unilaterally terminate it.
  - blowski 5y ago
    I agree in theory, although it makes me wonder why - according to this discussion at least - it hasn’t happened in practise.
    - danielheath 5y ago
      It’s a great undertaking to do it well. Hard to do without getting paid, and if it’s for profit you want SAAS since that means recurring revenue.
jmiserez 5y ago
>I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar. It didn't matter yet. People were shipping the software they made in HyperCard to customers on floppies or CDs. IIRC these were self-contained executables, so you didn't need to have HyperCard installed for it to run. One of the most famous examples of this was Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Myst is an interesting example… while it’s definitely a HyperCard stack, it relies heavily on XCMDs and XFCNs… which let you call into native code. So while it’s certainly the most famous example of a program written in HyperCard, it’s not a typical or representative example of how people made HyperCard programs. Here’s a recent thread about it: https://twitter.com/uliwitness/status/1408841306013581313 https://twitter.com/uliwitness/status/1408841306013581313

blowski 5y ago

Sounds like you're worried about what happens if you embed and tightly couple a lot of your business logic to something you don't have full control over? That's a totally valid concern, and probably one of the reasons we've tended to move away from these tools and towards doing everything in stable programming languages. It's a classic set of trade-offs - quality, features, stability, security, price. There are lots of solutions on the market offering one configuration of those trade-offs. If it existed today, some people would push for HyperCard to support mobile apps, multi-user access, web-based and native apps, all of which would make the solution 'worse" for others.

danielheath 5y ago
There’s nothing inherent about low-code that requires it to be tied to hosting provided by a specific entity which can unilaterally terminate it.
- blowski 5y ago
  I agree in theory, although it makes me wonder why - according to this discussion at least - it hasn’t happened in practise.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    It’s a great undertaking to do it well. Hard to do without getting paid, and if it’s for profit you want SAAS since that means recurring revenue.

jmiserez 5y ago

>I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar. It didn't matter yet. People were shipping the software they made in HyperCard to customers on floppies or CDs. IIRC these were self-contained executables, so you didn't need to have HyperCard installed for it to run. One of the most famous examples of this was Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst.

klodolph 5y ago
Myst is an interesting example… while it’s definitely a HyperCard stack, it relies heavily on XCMDs and XFCNs… which let you call into native code. So while it’s certainly the most famous example of a program written in HyperCard, it’s not a typical or representative example of how people made HyperCard programs. Here’s a recent thread about it: https://twitter.com/uliwitness/status/1408841306013581313 https://twitter.com/uliwitness/status/1408841306013581313