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I would like to remind everyone about Adobe Flash. It was one of the first mass-audience "no-code" platforms. It democratized web apps and games, allowing peop

I would like to remind everyone about Adobe Flash. It was one of the first mass-audience "no-code" platforms. It democratized web apps and games, allowing people who had no engineering background to build whatever they wanted. But did it? They would build what they wanted. And then, to their dismay, it performed like shit. Often, they would release their shit-performing product anyway. If you're an engineer, and you looked at what they did, you'd realize they made some mistakes - but they didn't know that. And they released their shit. And then millions of people would use their product/game/app/whatever they made (which performed like shit) and they would say to themselves: "Flash is a piece of shit". Adobe (and the Flash brand) never really recovered from this. They eventually stopped supporting it. This is personally a big problem for me, because I have some games that were written using Adobe's platforms (Clicker Heroes and others). But you live and learn. I believe this will be repeated, forever, for any/every no-code programming environment that ever gets popular. Inexperienced people will make great things that piss off a lot of users and they will blame the platform.

cookie_monsta 5y ago
The only reason I heard Flash described as a piece of shit back in the day was because of the security nightmare surrounding it. Apart from that it was kind of cool because it was about the only way you could have bells and whistles on a website. In the heyday of Flash, the internet itself was an entirely shitty experience performance-wise. Nobody had any expectations. My connection was so slow that I could watch images load one line at a time. Then we had a few good years of fast computers and decent connections before code bloat sucked the air out of it again. It's hard to generalise but where I have seen no-code succeed is with non-tech teams automating away some of their monkey work without having to come up with a budget for a developer or buy in from management. In that situation nobody cares if the app takes 5s to run when it could take 1s.

cookie_monsta 5y ago

The only reason I heard Flash described as a piece of shit back in the day was because of the security nightmare surrounding it. Apart from that it was kind of cool because it was about the only way you could have bells and whistles on a website. In the heyday of Flash, the internet itself was an entirely shitty experience performance-wise. Nobody had any expectations. My connection was so slow that I could watch images load one line at a time. Then we had a few good years of fast computers and decent connections before code bloat sucked the air out of it again. It's hard to generalise but where I have seen no-code succeed is with non-tech teams automating away some of their monkey work without having to come up with a budget for a developer or buy in from management. In that situation nobody cares if the app takes 5s to run when it could take 1s.