15 ms·

Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

141 points by daemond 4y ago

sporkland 4y ago
First: I feel like it already has, and did so way back in the day. Excel and Access (modern version Airtable) are no/low code tools that drastically expanded the set of things that business users/domain experts could do without a "programmer", and have likely supplanted a number of that would have been developed by "real developers" if they didn't exist. So the question is how much of that power can you push to those end users vs what needs to be held by "proper developers". I could see tools like advanced versions of co-pilot expanding the scope of what people can do to the point where only very high scale, very universal things are built by "proper developers".
haolez 4y ago
I've seen a lot more interest for this kind of tool in enterprise environments recently. Never seen this kind of interest before. I'm curious on how this is going to pan out.
- fny 4y ago
  See Microsoft Access.
- pletnes 4y ago
  More prototypes built in enterprises -> some succeed -> outgrow tools -> more consulting projects than ever before!
- mannykannot 4y ago
  It has been a perennial dream for six decades. The creators of Cobol and Fortran thought that was what they were producing! (Not literally no-code, but the notion that computing by non-specialists would result from putting assembler and other hardware-oriented knowledge under the covers.) After that, there were several waves of hype and disillusionment, though that seems to have dampened down in the 21st century. Spreadsheet programs are arguably the closest we got up to now, and that was a long time ago.
- ecshafer 4y ago
  I was involved with a project to bring these low-code / no-code tools into a financial company. I think its almost all driven out of the idea that software developers are expensive and development takes a long time. The "Dream" is that the business analyst or financial analyst or whomever automates their own job away, or that they write the business process (While being paid half as much!). Of course the issue is that they can't easily do this while they are also doing their own job, mistakes are made and they need "real" software developers to come in, it takes just as long or longer, etc.
- tootie 4y ago
  I think the potential value for niche line of business apps. The kinds of things that used to be drive by a spreadsheet can now be driven by a spreadsheet-driven mobile app with better defined workflow. I think this won't really displace much, if any, real development work. It will open up a lot of smaller tasks to automation. The kind of things that weren't valuable enough to warrant an expensive development project.
s_dev 4y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines. No.
rowanG077 4y ago
Ever? Of course if we get a GAI. Soon? Probably not.
danielvaughn 4y ago
My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. Code is perceived to be complex, but when you look deeply into what people mean when they say that, it's almost entirely a social perception. They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another level of intelligence. Code is really just a formalized expression of what you want. It happens to be used for very complex problems, because it's very good at solving complex problems. This in and of itself does not make code inherently complex.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  it just comes down to abstraction and associated tradeoffs. Low-code/no-code fundamentally isn't all that different from the difference between using Python vs a lower level language.
- failrate 4y ago
  Yes, and I have never struggled to execute something complex as I have with no-code tools. Nocode usually makes the HelloWorld trivial and anything meaningful more challenging than it would be to do in a general purpose language.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    This has been my universal experience with graphical code generation. Simple tasks are super simple, and easy to change, all good there, but the second you try to take that and grow it to do something you actually care about, it actually increases the complexity, as well as lengthening your development loop.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    It's like a very fast car that's perfect for driving straight into a ditch.
  - duped 4y ago
    This isn't just true of NoCode, it's endemic to young tools. These products are over-optimized toward low friction on-ramps because the only thing that matters is growth in DAUs. NoCode is just attractive because it propagates the myth that you can do things without programmers, and programmers are expensive. So you've got low friction + perceived lower cost == more users signing up.
mkrishnan 4y ago
Asp.net Forms and WinForms are much much much better rapid development tools than the kinds of bubble/retool etc. The issue is that lots of very young people have very limited set knowledge about the choices available to them.
Joe8Bit 4y ago
I do a fair amount of pre-seed and angel investing and I've seen a _massive_ increase in the number of very early businesses that have a "product" that they've been able to build with no/low code tools. It gives non-tech founders a set of options they've never had before, in my experience. That obviously isn't viable for all early businesses and even the ones it is viable for eventually need to hire engineering teams to build their products, but I love how much more accessible these tools have made shipping something basic.
- shafyy 4y ago
  I'm currently contracting for a client that uses a no-code tool to build their product, and this is exactly my opinion. If you're building a software startup, the only scenario where it makes sense to use a no-code tool (e.g., Bubble), is if you don't know to code. And even then, you will need to replace everything with proper code once you start growing. Of course, this is a bit different for low-code tools that are used internally etc.
- upupandup 4y ago
  Basically this space is deliver multiples on what engineer team would bring at multiple discounts. It's not really a sustainable model because they are constantly viewing it as a cost center even with the productivity no-code tools. So the moment some open source version is released or they see a cheaper solution they will flock to it especially if you allow easy migration. I've had requests from companies who were doing well with the no-code SaaS but felt they were being held hostage/realize they want an internal tool they own because their requireents always devolves past what no-code tool can do. This might not be an issue for SaaS who already publish their source code but for the vast majority of no-code/low code, it seems to cater to small to medium enterprises who are constantly looking to reduce their cost centers, even after achieving it an optimal setup.
- eagleinparadise 4y ago
  I am a non-tech founder building a app on building, basically very CRM/Data centric for a specific industry vertical I work in professionally. I am pushing Bubble to its limits where I have access to approx 150m records with all sorts of other database relationships to many millions of records. To build this app in a custom software solution, I have been quoted $100k to $500k depending on the backend architecture. Instead, I am spending around $20-30k in development costs to get my app off the ground to be able to pick up the first paying users... at least that's the goal and I'm a few weeks away from launch. I would also say that my "MVP" is not like Airbnb's MVP... my hope (and it seems) that it may be functional enough to nearly (70%) replace my existing CRM that I use day to day. Of course, I am planning to transition to a custom software solution once I validate, so I don't see bubble as a long term solution. I've self taught myself a bit of python and tried teaching myself JS as well off and on, so I am able to generally talk through with software developers what I'm trying to achieve and generally understand the technical things that might be discussed. So I'm not entirely a total non-technical noob. But the issue with Bubble is there is still a high barrier to actually learning how to use the platform for the average non tech person. It's a black box of sorts and they don't have the best education (unlike webflow). I mean come on, you have to pay $800 to take a bubble sponsored course? Lame. Nonetheless, you learn programming concepts by learning how to build on bubble. I'll end by replying to the top comment about code being perceived as complex. Spanish isn't complex. Nor is French. Maybe we can consider Japanese to be more complex. But even then, millions of people speak it just fine. Conjugations in Spanish are complex for a 40 year old English speaker new to Spanish but not complex for a 8 year old native speaker. But after a certain age, life takes hold, you begin working, and you lose the time and opportunity to spend 100's or 1,000's of hours learning another language. Trying to learn how to code is like this. I sometimes need to carve out 3-6 hours of a day to context-switch away from my busy (non-technical) professional & social life to get back into programming mode. Low code tools abstract away hours of that complexity you would have to learn, which allows you to start building something functional quicker than you otherwise would have. I know software devs look at low code and say "what's the matter with this crap, I can just spin up a X to do Y in 1 week, this is worthless!". But you are the native Spanish speaker in my metaphor, not the folks learning Spanish way past the days they had time to learn Spanish in college, trying to build the next greatest Spanish hit song to tell their story (i.e. software app!)
cbm-vic-20 4y ago
No. But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding". There are plenty of "no/low code" CRUD app builders, tools that manipulate components on a canvas to create web pages, even tools to integrate different systems together. But the second you need to go off the trail, you've now got a big problem: you're constrained to doing things that don't break the no/low code environment, and that's a lot harder than rolling your own components and customizations. Anything interesting enough to "disrupt" tech development will, almost by definition, not be possible in a no/low code environment.
- haunter 4y ago
  >But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding" 100% agreed Came up in another thread recently but Unreal Blueprints is a good example of that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's robust and perfectly fine, you can even build full games without any coding at all. Is it useful? Yes, but it would never replace "real" coding. Yet I'm excited to see any advancement on the field because it still feels like "magic" to some extent.
  - tinco 4y ago
    Unreal Blueprints isn't low code, it's just code, and it doesn't need to replace "real" coding because it is real coding. It does raise the question where the line is. Something that I'd consider a low code / no code platform is webflow. My non programmer CEO used it to create our marketing website, and it solved something for us that normally is a very highly technical problem. He had a couple small visual glitches, he asked me to help and I discovered that it actually was a pretty thin abstraction layer over some good practice CSS, and so the glitches were easily fixed by me thanks to that. Blueprint makes a programming language easy enough to use that a non experienced programmer might have a go at it, but in the end it's really just the outstanding library that makes it so powerful, you still need programming skills to solve programming problems with it.
    - 4y ago
dboreham 4y ago
Looks for lollipop...
fnordpiglet 4y ago
My hope is that no code / low code disrupts the waiting for developers to have time to do stupid tedious stuff that changes randomly. My perception is the tech industry recruits a ton of people into it that aren’t particularly interested or suited to try to triage the amount of simplistic logical manipulation of data and processes that doesn’t require going through a full development cycle. By offloading some portion of that back to end users you can give them an inflection point to work without danger while keeping engineers focused on the complex parts of the system - and hopefully hire less people into tech teams who aren’t engineers.
mantis_shrimp 4y ago
As someone who got their start in tech with a low-code environment (ServiceNow reporting) I have found the true value of low code is the ability for business/ops teams to create tools that serve their needs without waiting on a team of "real" developers to make time for them. One of the biggest benefits is the sense of excitement this creates for these users as they are able to add the logic of programming into a process that was formerly a manual one. When they do reach their "edge" around low-code, they can then engage development teams with better knowledge about the system and a clearer vision for what they need. As other comments have said, low-code will always have trouble solving special cases due to their very nature of being simple and interchangeable. However, empowering others to solve these low hanging fruit problems liberates the develops from a backlog full of basic functionality and allows them to focus on the big problems that will require more robust tooling and design.
- alexpotato 4y ago
  I 100% agree on the savings of real developer time when end users can self service. At the same time, I've also seen users do incredibly crazy things because either they didn't know any better or just didn't bother to "read the code". Good example of this is people just keep creating Statuses in JIRA until you end up with "Which of these 264 'Completed' statuses is the one I want?". It's similar to the Ops person "Hey, I wrote a Perl script that does what I want. Yay!" that turns out to be a spaghetti ball of copy/pasta. This is maybe less of a point about programming and more about governance. Either way, you will still need specialized people who make sure that everything is being done in some kind of guardrails.
  - alphager 4y ago
    > At the same time, I've also seen users do incredibly crazy things because either they didn't know any better or just didn't bother to "read the code". Good example of this is people just keep creating Statuses in JIRA until you end up with "Which of these 264 'Completed' statuses is the one I want?". Why is this a problem? Programs are a means to an end. The 264 Jira statuses are messy and could be done away with, but would a clean solution actually change anything for the better? In a significant, "it was worth spending the money on a real developer" way?
acjohnson55 4y ago
They already have, in many ways. Look at the "modern data stack" -- the idea that you can replace a ton of bespoke ETL platform and implementation with managed, low-code tools. It's been really successful. But this and other examples don't feel like disruption though because there's still an ever expanding universe of work that requires code.
alkonaut 4y ago
No. Not general purpose application development. Not ever. But niche applications or parts of applications might be. We see lots of “apps” that are spreadsheets or old access databases. In games/vfx and sound you see “shader graphs” and “audio pipelines” take over the job of code for parts of a codebase. Learning tools with puzzle pieces for code statements aren’t “low code” they are just an accessible way of writing regular code. The amount of code created is typically much larger and the complexity higher than with a regular language. Regular program code is the low complexity answer to general purpose software development.
smt88 4y ago
Yes, absolutely. I know firsthand. Instead of hiring developers to do a 2-month project to build us a suite of admin tools, I built them myself in Retool over the course of a couple of days. For a non-developer, maybe we're still far away from disruption. Excel seems to be the programming platform of choice for most people anyway. But for developers, these things turn you into RoboCop. It's amazing how much I can get done now that I don't have to worry about UI, build pipelines, etc.
- char_star_star 4y ago
  Thank you for expressing exactly what I’ve felt. In my experience something like Retool lets you spin up an incredible amount of functionality very quickly, and it also does a great job of helping you find the boundary where you should do something elsewhere. Honestly the hardest part of my work with Retool has been convincing other devs that they should use it for internal use cases. While they’re still waiting on designs to be done in Figma I’ve got multiple users trying out a solution in Retool that I can update in near real-time to see what works best.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  I've used Retool as UI and Airtable as DB for so many tiny custom apps, it's great. Retool ends up being used to create "constraints" on top of Airtable in a way that enforces how people add / view records. It's such a great combo.
LABerthier 4y ago
No code is still code! https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/11/no-code-is-code/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/11/no-code-is-code/
garyclarke27 4y ago
I disagree with this opinion "Anyone marketing a low or no code tool to developers is targeting the wrong audience" Switched-on developers are a perfect market for good no-code/low-code tools. If a tool is 100 times more productive, why on earth would a smart developer not use it to deliver value to their customers?? I wrote a complete ERP and CRM system using our No-code platform - this would have been impossible for a single person using traditional tools such as Java. I've written a couple of blog posts explaining why the rise of No-Code/Low code is inevitable. https://www.onedb.online/blog/why_no_code_is_better_than_full_code https://www.onedb.online/blog/why_no_code_is_better_than_ful... https://www.onedb.online/blog/the_future_for_software_engineers_in_a_no_code_world https://www.onedb.online/blog/the_future_for_software_engine...
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  > this would have been impossible for a single person using traditional tools such as Java I don't think so?
  - bogwog 4y ago
    When someone selling you a product makes claims like this that are bordering on gas lighting, that should raise some red flags.
spamizbad 4y ago
What happens to the software built with these tools when the no-code tooling company goes under? Do you have 30 days to port everything you did to something else before they turn it all off?
anotheryou 4y ago
I'd say yes, but not in the way you think. It's still programming, just a trying to be nice. Here and there it makes programming worse by e.g. not being very object oriented sometimes, but overall it always tries to make everything as high level as possible. High level programming languages on top of low level ones have been a hit ever since. The day I can plug together APIs and basic user management will be great: Make default user UI with login, profile, picture, make a twitter-style feed where everyone can subscribe to others. This I imagine possible within a day. Ideally you also wrap some APIs for me so I can e.g. take my existing twitter feed and do stuff with it. We are not too far from all that, but if you want to do one custom step you are back at jumping in to a lower level and need to build components yourself and it's just even more annoying :). It also has a way better chance with narrow use cases and is very successful there: chat bot builders, configuration of headless CMS admin UIs, analytics tools, KNIME even try machine learning and it looks wonderful.
sam0x17 4y ago
They are already. I consult for a lot of hyper-early-stage YC startups as they formulate their plans and I've had two separate clients in the past 6 months go the no-code route to build their MVP. At first I was against it, but having seen these clients go through it I would say it is much cheaper and less risky and gives developers an extremely good blueprint for when the founders inevitably decide to go beyond the MVP stage and build their own codebase. No-code platforms are a great way for non-technical (and even technical!) founders to do that hard product work of figuring out what they actually want their app to do and how each screen should work. Things like figma let you do this too, but I find founders will often make something in figma with logic holes or missing flows if they aren't thinking like an engineer. The no-code platforms force you to make these decisions because you'll notice the holes the moment you go to use the app instead of noticing them when your developers go to implement something that doesn't make sense. Much cheaper way to do early iteration.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- habeyer 4y ago
  It was low-code for the back-end as well or just front-end? Back-end feels really risky to me, because visual logic builders are just so limiting compared to code.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    It depends on the application. In this case both clients were using a no-code system used by big fintech players like Goldman Sachs that costs $150k for a one year license.
jampa 4y ago
Depends on the use case. As someone without a lot of budget to hire devs, I currently use no code in my company extensively, our Airtable has 50 tables, some of them with > 10k records. There is certain excitement to do all in no-code now, but the ceiling is truly there as the article says, the rule of thumb is that if something is operational and not core for business we do in low code, if it is business critical (we lose money if goes down) then it gets coded. What happens if our business goes down, and is <low code tool> fault? We can't just say "welp" to our customers complaints, recently we saw that not even Atlassian is immune to long outages. Also what happens when the market needs for you to do "X" and the tool can't? Now you are stuck in a low-code environment with 3 months migration while the competitors pass ahead. We also got a lot of bugs with this tools on things that were supposed to work, and it slowed us down significantly. From what I see that the best use case of low code is kickstarting software projects. If done with the right tool (one that allows for easy exporting), it allows to get the data in order for future scaling with code. Since changing application logic in a living project (and even the entire language / framework) happens all the time, but the data generally does not, this seems like a best case scenario for a new feature or product that still needs to validate their market fit.
krishvs 4y ago
Having used low-code tools successfully to build ERP systems for the past few years. I feel low code tools can only really disrupt development once they solve the problem of requirements gathering from customers/ end users and also formally describe change management in low-code as well. As long as there is ambiguity in requirements - code or low code makes no difference.
- char_star_star 4y ago
  One thing I’ve found is that if you put something together in thirty minutes you’ll get much more detailed requirements because end users now have a tangible thing to organize their thoughts around.
PinkPigeon 4y ago
I've recently been building a business directory using Bubble.io. It took me about half a day to do tutorials and another half day playing around just to learn the platform. After that, I was able to build this business directory, including Stripe payment integration, some reasonably advanced Google Maps and search / categorisation functionality. Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so. I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS. Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly. At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it. It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it. If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot. Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning. I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.
otikik 4y ago
Eventually, yes. But we will be approaching AGIs at that point. On a shorter term, the disruption they can provide is similar to the one involving cryptocurrencies and blockchain: a lot of hype, grift, and few real applications.
nscalf 4y ago
For everyone saying no, this is exactly what Shopify, and arguably Wordpress are. These things have already disrupted tech development. I think the real question is how much complexity can they take on, and I think they’re largely near the end of that curve.
- DAVer98 4y ago
  Good point. Not too different to the application surface of AI where nocode is similiar to general AI but instead of aiming for that we're now learning to scope down to expert systems to see real gains.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I would suggest that they are more akin to "control panels," on complex machinery. Even "control panels," require a lot of training, for complex enough machinery. However, a great place to see well-written PHP, is inside the WordPress stack.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I think Wordpress is a great example. I recently tried making a simple website using Wordpress's visual layout editor, and it was absolute hell. The process consists of fighting with unlabeled icons, convoluted UI state that is controlled by mouse movements apparently, shit jumping around all over the place when you add/remove stuff, and a ton of other terrible UX decisions. It felt like I was trying to perform a satanic ritual with my mouse. I'm not a front end guy, but I was able to write exactly what I wanted directly in HTML/CSS in around 2-3 hours. That's for a static site with responsive layout and like 3 pages. Could someone who is actually in expert in Wordpress's editor do this in less than 3 hours? No doubt. But at the end of the day, all it cost me to build a vastly superior solution was a few hours (and again, I'm not an expert at frontend stuff at all, so that was not as fast as it could be done). Instead of having to host a bloated Wordpress site now, I just need to serve a few static HTML/CSS files, which can be done for free nowadays with a lot of providers. So the no code solution is more expensive to operate, and less efficient/performant. But at the same time, it doesn't require an expensive developer (even if an actual front-end dev would only need 1 billable hour at most)
- 4y ago
kohlerm 4y ago
NO
deepdriver 4y ago
Unreal Engine Blueprints have been a game-changer for me personally, no pun intended. The rapid prototyping, API discoverability, and total immunity to 99% of dumb syntax errors which drag-and-drop visual programming provides has been a great help to learning Unreal. At the end of the day my ambitions are bigger than what I can efficiently build with Blueprints, but they're a great starting point for demos and small one-off applications.
goatcode 4y ago
Most developers I've interacted with have extreme limitations outside of their immediate expertise, and some (especially those who seem to be getting culled lately) are barely functional. With that, I'd suspect one of two possible futures: 1. Insufficient skill to make such automation work 2. A large enough number of people are capable of making this happen, and after that, everyone else('s career) dies. I for one welcome our new overlords.
daniel-thompson 4y ago
I tend to agree with Randall Munroe on this: > You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. (https://xkcd.com/568/ https://xkcd.com/568/)
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Totally agreed, really the goal of any programming whatever is to determine how easy is it to model the related logic. Low-code/No-code is not some magic bullet, it's just another way of doing it. The question has always been how well can you abstract certain well known logic. Rails makes it so you don't have to interact with networking primitives... Until you try in a way that doesn't match that. But there are a whole mess of crud apps in the world. The real thing that I think low code will hit up against is scale. Everyone in the world can write twitter in a CS 101 class, but scale means a closer connection between the business logic and the technical implementation and I think you'll run into the 9 foot ladder 10 foot wall problem. Low code/No Code will be increasingly useful at building larger and better apps, but the problem spaces and scale will continue to grow.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Sure. Lots of people who cant code can put together a squarespace site. I know a decent number of barbers or other small business owners who have nice looking websites they tossed together in a few hours.
jmull 4y ago
Well... for no/low code to take over everything, we'd need 10x the developers to create it all and then probably 20x the developers, in perpetuity, to handle the integrations. "Code" isn't an end to itself. Many developers spend their hours, days and careers trying to think of the simplest, clearest way to specify solutions to the problems they work on. Code (and data) is the best general thing we've been able to come up with. There can certainly be complexity arising from the code itself (more generally -- are you spending your time solving problems in the solution space or problem space?) but you need some way to deal with the complexity inherent to the problem. If there's a better way to do it than code, I'd be more than happy to jump on it. There are some good no/low code systems -- like spread sheets and some of the forms systems -- where they've found a powerful, flexible, yet simple enough abstraction. But these tend to form silos, and you need a ready escape hatch where the complexity of the underly problem exceeds the capability of the system (which is very common for anything useful).
fassssst 4y ago
I use them to great advantage as an engineering manager. If you have programming skills, you can use these tools to whip stuff up significantly faster than people without programming skills. It’s an organizational super power. I just replaced an internal web app used for planning with a data visualization tool dashboard that can spit out a spreadsheet for further analysis. Took a week to build something that solves the business problem better than several months of effort put into the web app did. I didn’t have to deal with auth, security and privacy reviews, building a custom UI that people would have to learn, learning data source API’s, or build/deployment.
- char_star_star 4y ago
  I’m increasingly of the opinion that if it doesn’t face customers it should be done using something like Retool. Especially considering that you can just plug it into your internal APIs so if you need to do anything particularly hairy you can still use your backend.
platz 4y ago
Sometimes you just need some IFFT-like actions triggered on some kind of event. In Azure stuff like Logic Apps / Power Automate is particularly geared to running actions based on events or recurrence schedules with minimal code.
Demonsult 4y ago
No code tools give people with no idea what they are doing a chance to prove it.
tut-urut-utut 4y ago
Well, no code and low code solutions are in practice more code. You use a tool, that is supposed to solve a trivial or a simple problem, and it works great until the first change requests come. With the second or third change request, the complexity is already so big, that no code is not a solution any more. But then, you have sunken costs, and no approval to rewrite. So, you keep adding a workaround around a workaround and another layer of patching or complexity, until a few years later you finally get an approval to ditch the no-code tool and rewrite using an actual code. In the end, cost and effort is much higher, than as if it were implemented properly in code from the beginning. You write a lesson learned, discuss it with the team and management, get an agreement to do it right the next time. Then, a week later, a new project starts, you want to do it in code, but get overridden because it's a perfect use case for this great low code or no code tool you are using. Source: every integration / middleware / ESB developer in every enterprise company.
Flankk 4y ago
Disrupt, yes. Replace, no. Programming is moving to ever higher levels of abstraction. It's just a continuation of the trend. You'll still have the lower levels when you need them. It reminds me of WordPress. It will get the job done for most people but at the end of the day it's a piece of crap.
lofatdairy 4y ago
I think no code/low code solutions certainly have a place, but the way they're currently designed is not necessarily helpful (I've worked on replacing integromat and automate.io solutions in the past). Those solutions are fine, for the most part, but they're main flaw is that in order to get anything done you have to integrate them with other tools/software, which means that you're limited by what parts of the api the developers exposed to the no-code. That and the abstractions they produce on the UI end can be confusing and difficult to navigate. That's less their fault and more of an outcome from being a shiny new tool trying to do everything, but it results in a solution that doesn't really work for the people who would go for a low-code solution in the first place. A good model in my mind is Excel. The amazing part of Excel is that it can be used as a no-code tool, a low code tool, and extended with code macros. Even self-described non-coders who would otherwise be intimidated often use to extreme productivity. It's extremely visual, straightforward, and self-contained for the most part. The fact that it's so well documented as well is also hugely important. The no code solutions I've seen and worked with usually are fairly lacking in this regard, but excel has fairly clear documentation, the famous f1 key, and a support line[^1] which makes it a more default choice. The only problem is that integrating it with your other tools relies on either 3rd party plugins, a coder, or integrating specifically w/ other ms software. [^1]: I had a professor state in a comparison between MATLAB and Python that the reason to choose MATLAB was that they had a customer support line. This wasn't a CS professor, so you shouldn't underestimate how much value is placed on talking to a human rather than RTFM by non-coders.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Excel wizards who consider themselves non-programmers, end up with what I would consider programming skills. And this is the rub with low/no-code solutions. To use them effectively, you have to have some programming skills already. They are perfect for lazy programmers, but less so for "Citizen Developers". At least, I haven't come across any I was really impressed with as a "Citizen Developer" platform. I would happily take references to any I should check out that might succeed at enabling non-coders to build production solutions.
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
rzwitserloot 4y ago
Most comments here are in agreement that a ton of programming is doing complicated things, and the complicated part is not "which letters do I press on this keyboard to make code loop a few times". Hence, low-code tools don't solve the right complexity problem. So let's move beyond that. We've all been there, from time to time you have a database table or whatnot that "makes sense" (its columns closely match what users of the software expect to see), and you really just need to expose CRUD operations, add half a page worth of validation and action buttons and then the app is done. (CRUD = standard db ops; CREATE, SELECT (Read), UPDATE, DELETE). Why is the 'low-code automatisation' of that part wavering in and out of popularity? low-code solutions _can_ capture away the right kind of complexity here, no? And it's been tried. In many forms. Many times. In the 90s, 'database-oriented software development' was very popular. FoxPro, MS Access, xbase, that sort of thing. You got the CRUD stuff for free, and all you were really doing was designing forms to lay out the various DB columns and maybe adding special scripted actions to certain buttons. That was pretty much it, already quite low code and trying to, I dunno, turn those scripts into more lego-brick-style low-code solutions seems feasible at that point, too. The development environment was all in on this. The basic interface was a form designer. Then you'd click on a button in the form and 'add an action listener'. The other main view is your columns and tables view where you can click on things to 'add change listeners'. You blessed some form view as the 'main view' which loaded on app start, and that's how you build an app. But FoxPro, MSAccess, that sort of stuff mostly died out. The vast majority of software, both consumer and business oriented, is written in java, python, C#, javascript - those sorts of languages. General languages where database support isn't even baked in - you need to add a dependency no less. The concept was then reinvented: Rails (Ruby-on-Rails) with the notion of 'skeleton' generation, which didn't just generate the barest of bones ("Here is the source file containing the entry point, here is a project definition and all you need to do is edit the names") - but did a lot more than that, giving you a basic but functionally styled web interface for CRUD ops. The development 'model' of rails is then to just add new features and endpoints, and perhaps even replace these CRUD pages one day, until you're happy with your app. But rails is far less popular today than it used to be, and whilst various web frameworks still offer really easy ways to toss up CRUD operations, it seems to me like it's less of a key feature, and various frameworks that don't have it or whose CRUD support seems like an afterthought are still quite popular. Direct rails clones in other languages, such as Grails (for java), have pretty much died out. Why? It's the fact that "the low code experiment has been tried a ton of times and it has failed every time" that teaches me that low-code is doomed to fail. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain _why_ it fails. Just that it is likely to.
catwind7 4y ago
This line stood out to me: > “As it stands now, there seems to be a tradeoff between ease-of-use and control, and until someone figures out how to remove that tradeoff, there will always be a need for engineers who can fully manipulate software to meet the full range of use cases businesses (and individuals) need.” we're constantly making this type of tradeoff as developers. It's not just a decision we make at the beginning of a project where we look at the requirements and say hey no-code might be the way to go here. have you written a function for a library to hide information / details of how something works? that's a tradeoff between ease and control for the client. now expose that through a GUI with some params and now you have "no-code". sometimes that's ok. it's nice to have options!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robswc 4y ago
To a degree... but the problem with a lot of "low/no-code" is the people using it, lol. I'm not a musician, so even with better/different tools, I can't compose a good song. Same goes for a lot of low-code solutions I've come across. The design/architecture causes a lot of problems. The big ones I've seen are ppl designing without thinking about side effects and responsibility of "modules." I'm probably bias though, as I do contract work that is 99% replacing low-code solutions with something proprietary. I think it works out pretty good though. They usually have some sort of system in place and "working." Makes my job a lot easier as you can see the "shape" of their intent. There's always going to be one or two things that bother a PM to the point of switching to some proprietary solution ;)
Brushfire 4y ago
Lol, this whole discussion is like a bunch of architects talking about how folks shouldn't do DIY projects on their own, and yet... DIY is a huge thing because most people are actually reasonably intelligent and capable of doing things on their own.
oneaaronofmany 4y ago
Will compiled languages ever truly disrupt writing assembly code?
nuncanada 4y ago
TL;DR: I spoke with a lot of people in the industry and thus came to the conclusion that X will not be disruptive... The good part of the bet is that most potential disruptions end not happening... But the exactly same median consensus is also reached about the disruptions that do end happening...
Quarrelsome 4y ago
The amount of effort we put into people who refuse to learn to script to allow them to perform complex tasks feels like such a waste. I've seen in my industry, we used to spend ages making the most ridiculously complicated front-ends for complex tasks. Now finally we're starting to accept that these orgs will have people who can smack out a bit of Python and suddenly we get to stop wasting our time and focus on supporting those who accept they have to code. No code/low code will always remain toy and brittle outside of demo-esqe use-cases and those who are willing to open a file in notepad and tinker will retain a significant advantage over the rest.
webignition 4y ago
I agree with the sentiments regarding the use of low-code/no-code tools for general purpose programming. I'd like to present a specific use case as an example of how domain-specific no-code tools can help. I'm developing a tool for automated browser testing. This fits well into the description of being no-code and is being developed as an alternative to writing C#- or Java-based browser automation tests in Selenium. The "code" that you write is more akin to configuration that defines what page elements you want to interact with, how you want to interact with them and what you expect to happen. There's more to it than that, but this is not a sales pitch. My project is in direct response to the experiences my partner encountered when providing browser automation training to manual testers within businesses. Browser automation testing requires, in broad terms, a small subset of what is offered by C# or Java, however a significant understanding of and familiarity with matters such as objects, variables, sane naming and debugging is required to even begin reaching competence. Many manual web testers, who were very capable, were just not able to grasp coding matters sufficiently. Many were, but plenty were not. For those that barely could, I feel for the people who have to maintain what would then have been created in their businesses. Programming that requires only a subset of a general-purpose programming language has the capacity of being implemented in a no-code tool if the scope of the programming needs are narrow.
excitom 4y ago
Once you have tools that let someone with no skills build a product, you get a product that works like it was built by someone with no skills.
brandonmenc 4y ago
They have been ever since VisiCalc.
gumby 4y ago
They already have and will continue to. Most programmers don’t even think about their machine’s internal circuitry, much less know how a circuit works. They put their attention on other things. The ability to assemble 60%, 80%, even 100% of a simple application by snapping together building blocks has lead to a massive democraticratization of programming. Yes, and buggy crap and security holes, but it’s easier to fix some of them by improving the Lego bricks. This is a triumph of abstraction. == The first “no code” system I ever saw was called, IIRC, “eve” at some PC expo back around 1981. There was a bit of buzz in the press and then that was the end of it. Then again, that was the promise of FORTRAN (and then COBOL). BTW the article itself was meandering and mushy. I gave up on it.
drbojingle 4y ago
Essentually asking "can newer tech become easier to use and more accessible". The answer is yes. Ive seen juniors struggle with django but make quick progress with hasura. I know plenty of developers who still dont use snippets. As far as im concerned to say that low code or no code couldnt disrupt tech is to say that software can't become easier to make or more accessible to people out of collage which i dont believe. Big problem these days is that tech has become more complex because we make it more complex. It doesnt always have to be that way. Enforcing good taste will be an interesting challange but just like easy to use guns made archery redudant for war, easy to use low code/no code tools will help take care of the urgent issues that arent important. That'll free up dev time for other things.
shudza 4y ago
No-code only works for MVPs, landing pages, and generally projects that are being bootstraped which are not tech-specific. You can have a solution using no-code at roughly 20% the price of hiring a developer to do it from scratch.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I think it's useful to flip the script a bit and ask this question: why are software developers so often stuck writing software with their only abstraction available being text? Isn't that working with one hand tied behind their back? I do a lot of work in geometric tools, and the fact that the best thing that we have for unit tests is to painstakingly construct objects by specifying their coordinate space hurts. Our team gained a lot of velocity on building and maintaining unit tests by simply writing a tiny graphical tool to convert back and forth between a text representation of a coordinate space and a visual representation, because visual presentation is far better for the average human than a text description for a bunch of circles and rectangles. The signal gets lost in the noise. I also still think there's meat on the bones of tooling that makes it harder or impossible to craft invalid programs. When we're editing text files, a modern IDE will throw some red underlines under the text when we've written something that it knows won't compile, which is a massive step in the right direction. But contrast that with humble Scratch, which makes it structurally impossible to write an invalid program as you go (incomplete, yes, but an incomplete program is obvious because it will have unfilled slots). I wonder sometimes if tooling that treated the syntactic components of a language as things, not strings, would actually allow developers to move faster with some training.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Structural editors are not a new idea. They have well-known drawbacks wrt. supporting incremental editing of program text, which as a rule requires "passing through" invalid representations. This actually makes them quite unintuitive for such tasks. OTOH, modern editing tools, such as "language servers", provide most of the advantages without the aforementioned issues.
tjpnz 4y ago
I'm not worried, if anything I can see the latest crop of tools creating additional opportunities for traditional developers. I know of freelancers who get a lot of work lifting and shifting previously successful lc/nc solutions developed in Excel or Access.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tailspin2019 4y ago
Yes. As technology progresses, in general, we tend to create and move up into new layers of abstraction. This is one of them. At the same time, "traditional" software development isn't going anywhere soon. In the short to medium term it may even become more valuable and sought after because an increasing number of technically minded people will enter the market at this new level of abstraction and never learn traditional software development at all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I've seen no/low code stuff for pretty much the entirety of my career (going back into the 1980s). Execs seem to love them. They never seem to go far. I am not speculating on why they never make it. It's easy to see why execs love them.
guhcampos 4y ago
They already did. Stuff like IFTTT, Zappier and Slack Workflows are extremely valuable for most non trivial organizations. We just keep looking at this from a developer perspective, but from a business perspective it's there.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
Low/no code tools stove the wrong problem. The problem we should be solving is not the accessibility of code itself, but the accessibility of toolchains. The most confusing thing about learning to make software isn't writing a Hello World program or a Fibonacci series loop. It's figuring out what to do with that code once it's written. People don't interact with terminals and shells anymore, but guess what nearly every Hello World program is written for? A shell. We have a lot of tools that try to hide the toolchain, and even the shell itself, from the uninitiated developer. Unfortunately, hiding the complexity of the very system you are writing code for causes more problems than it solves. How can you learn to get input from the user if you don't even know how to use a shell? How can you start using libraries if you don't know where they are, or how they are distributed to the user? How do you configure the correct environment variables if you don't even know what shell you are running or how/where it was initialized? We should instead be doing the inverse: do everything we can to show new programmers the system they are using. Show them all the pieces of the puzzle, and how those pieces fit together, because our new programmer's primary goal is to make new puzzle pieces.
quantum_state 4y ago
Similar attempts occurred b4. Without addressing the real root causes, it will create yet another mess.
htrp 4y ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
arijo 4y ago
I've heard of companies organising the low code department under UI/UX. Any explanation for this?
agustinbena 4y ago
Did ever Visual Basic back in the 90's disrupt tech? Not that much. It certainly back then allowed a lot of people with low skill/experience in dev to jump in development. Was an inclusive tool but not revolutionary. Tools like github copilot gives us a glimpse of how will be the tool that will revolutionize tech dev on day in the future IMHO.
atlgator 4y ago
Maybe this is inexperience on my part, but the LCNC tools I've used are very clunky, with UIs that are plain at best, and performance that is cumbersome. While there is certainly a place for them in the business world, I can't see them replacing a really snappy, custom product with beautiful and intuitive UX/UI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Pete-Codes 4y ago
I just keep hearing "no code is the future!" from people who sell no-code courses
jrm4 4y ago
That's a lot of hopium here. The problem (around here) is that the sort of people who write these blogs and/or frequent Hacker News mostly would be harmed by this kind of development. I wouldn't. Bring on the new Hypercard.
cm2187 4y ago
My experience is that the people for whom learning a bit if SQL is a bridge too far, will also not invest time into learning some complex automation software. And these no/low code software all look like complicated electrical diagrams when you are doing real life workflows. The category of people who are ready to invest time in understanding those tools are the people who might as well spend the same time or less learning SQL and maybe a bit of python or VBA. As for business users doing code, I wish there were more, and I think younger users tend to be a bit more technical, but it's a light breeze, not a big change.
29athrowaway 4y ago
"Homepage generators" and "website builders" appeared shortly after web browsers. Almost 3 decades later, people still have jobs writing HTML and CSS.
bobowzki 4y ago
No.
ramoz 4y ago
No code is for mundane human processes and commodity development you want to get done cheaply, whether internal or outsourced. That’s already been disrupted by major platforms. These smaller platforms can only ever dream of becoming the next service now, appian, Salesforce, pega, etc. Anyone who stays near to, or on, the bleeding edge of technology will know that no-code isn’t a real thing for them. Add some extra automation and boilerplate capabilities by all means, but software will always eat software.
newbieuser 4y ago
Are companies willing to pay for no code tools? Do you know a company that spends money on these tools?
thingification 4y ago
I can't seem to find people in this thread talking about AI/ML, which surprised me. For "enterprise software", I imagine a future of domain experts training/instructing AI minions to do things like process sale orders and returns - like the office clerks of the past, but silicon clerks. And if that, why not consumer apps etc. too? The next "everything is bloated electron apps" is "everything is bloated AI models" ?-)
fatbird 4y ago
At my workplace, one of our common sayings is “when you’re doing badly, users complain about bugs; when you’re doing well, they’re complaining about missing features.” From 1998 to 2004 I worked as the IT manager at a plastics manufacturer whose entire system was backed by SQL Server, and fronted by MS Access databases that people ran locally for the forms and reports (no data was stored in them) or Excel (same thing). This is low-code in a nutshell and it worked well back then: it was CRUD before websites were CRUD. And we were constantly developing it and building out more complex scenarios for industrial production control and accounting and reporting. Why? Because it worked, it allowed users to conceive of the next thing they could use, which inevitably led out of low-code scenarios. At one point we seriously investigated hiring trying to implement bin-packing algorithms in VBA so that warehouse pickers had better direction in order assembly. Low code systems either don’t work, or they do and create demand for “high code” solutions.
kizer 4y ago
Don't forget that stack overflow has an interest in developers continuing to use code!
analog31 4y ago
I call it the one page problem, which is how you represent something that's bigger than one page. Code and math notation attack this problem by design. All other tools try to do it as an afterthought, or not at all.
mr_coleman 4y ago
They already have. My career started making websites that are now made in Wordpress. Look at Salesforce and Sharepoint.
999900000999 4y ago
What I really like is visual scripting which compiles to code, that you can then edit and use for your application. There's a plug-in for blender called Armory which does this. It's only for game development, but I think something like that could really revolutionize software development. Let people drag and drop, and customize.
sorokod 4y ago
For me an interesting question would be: "How would a niech, low code tools can comfortably fill, looks like?"
habeyer 4y ago
Low/no-code tools as replacements for devs is never going to happen. But as an "aid" to empower developers... absolutely. The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious which is generally a good target for disruptive automation. Of course one of the big challenges will be that devs are most comfortable coding in text-heavy non-GUI environments like the IDE or terminal, and any low-code tooling that leans on a visual interface is going to struggle. This was actually a huge problem for me at https://rapidream.com https://rapidream.com (apologies for the shameless plug). I wanted a Figma-to-React dev-tool that I could actually use on my real "day-job" projects, but designing an interface and user flow for users who don't like low-codey tooling was almost a bigger challenge then the actual tech.
- schwartzworld 4y ago
  > The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious. I think the take that frontend isn't hard is extremely outdated. Responsiveness and a11y are nuanced problems with huge surface areas. As designs get more complex, keeping all these things in check requires tooling that needs to be learned. People on HN constantly bemoan the complexity of frontend development and how hard it has become. There's a reason drag and drop isn't the default way of creating a web page, despite tools for this being around for 30 years.
  - habeyer 4y ago
    I misspoke. It's not Front-End dev as a whole, just the "pushing-pixels" stuff. There's a ton of difficult FE work (esp. state). It's just that when it comes to a lot of the "basic" styling and responsiveness there's a lot of tedious work that should be automate-able (just like any framework or library, the goal is to reduce unnecessary work, not to suggest that the work is trivial).
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I'm going to bang my "software is a form of literacy" drum again. No-code is a "solution" to illiteracy. It is (snarky example alert) like taking all the cells in all the Marvel comics, cutting them out singly and arranging them in order (punch, horror, fly) and saying "now you too can write a story" Yeah kind of. But what we need is not No-Code. what we need are two things - more people who learn to code, and companies that make their data and processes accessible to code. But it's like trying to start a marketplace - you need to attract the buyers and the sellers at the same time
darepublic 4y ago
I have twice now built in-house low code interfaces for companies. A recurring problem is when the same product manager who requested the low code interfaces turns around and created a bunch of stories that go beyond the limits of said interface. It's like they ask me to build a high performance racing car and then on race day they bring me to an off road dirt trail.

141 points by daemond 4y ago

First: I feel like it already has, and did so way back in the day. Excel and Access (modern version Airtable) are no/low code tools that drastically expanded the set of things that business users/domain experts could do without a "programmer", and have likely supplanted a number of that would have been developed by "real developers" if they didn't exist. So the question is how much of that power can you push to those end users vs what needs to be held by "proper developers". I could see tools like advanced versions of co-pilot expanding the scope of what people can do to the point where only very high scale, very universal things are built by "proper developers".

haolez 4y ago

I've seen a lot more interest for this kind of tool in enterprise environments recently. Never seen this kind of interest before. I'm curious on how this is going to pan out.

fny 4y ago
See Microsoft Access.
pletnes 4y ago
More prototypes built in enterprises -> some succeed -> outgrow tools -> more consulting projects than ever before!
mannykannot 4y ago
It has been a perennial dream for six decades. The creators of Cobol and Fortran thought that was what they were producing! (Not literally no-code, but the notion that computing by non-specialists would result from putting assembler and other hardware-oriented knowledge under the covers.) After that, there were several waves of hype and disillusionment, though that seems to have dampened down in the 21st century. Spreadsheet programs are arguably the closest we got up to now, and that was a long time ago.
ecshafer 4y ago
I was involved with a project to bring these low-code / no-code tools into a financial company. I think its almost all driven out of the idea that software developers are expensive and development takes a long time. The "Dream" is that the business analyst or financial analyst or whomever automates their own job away, or that they write the business process (While being paid half as much!). Of course the issue is that they can't easily do this while they are also doing their own job, mistakes are made and they need "real" software developers to come in, it takes just as long or longer, etc.
tootie 4y ago
I think the potential value for niche line of business apps. The kinds of things that used to be drive by a spreadsheet can now be driven by a spreadsheet-driven mobile app with better defined workflow. I think this won't really displace much, if any, real development work. It will open up a lot of smaller tasks to automation. The kind of things that weren't valuable enough to warrant an expensive development project.

s_dev 4y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines. No.

rowanG077 4y ago

Ever? Of course if we get a GAI. Soon? Probably not.

danielvaughn 4y ago

My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. Code is perceived to be complex, but when you look deeply into what people mean when they say that, it's almost entirely a social perception. They see these weird characters and it looks like gibberish and they assume that the people who understand this gibberish are somehow on another level of intelligence. Code is really just a formalized expression of what you want. It happens to be used for very complex problems, because it's very good at solving complex problems. This in and of itself does not make code inherently complex.

ren_engineer 4y ago
it just comes down to abstraction and associated tradeoffs. Low-code/no-code fundamentally isn't all that different from the difference between using Python vs a lower level language.
failrate 4y ago
Yes, and I have never struggled to execute something complex as I have with no-code tools. Nocode usually makes the HelloWorld trivial and anything meaningful more challenging than it would be to do in a general purpose language.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  This has been my universal experience with graphical code generation. Simple tasks are super simple, and easy to change, all good there, but the second you try to take that and grow it to do something you actually care about, it actually increases the complexity, as well as lengthening your development loop.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  It's like a very fast car that's perfect for driving straight into a ditch.
- duped 4y ago
  This isn't just true of NoCode, it's endemic to young tools. These products are over-optimized toward low friction on-ramps because the only thing that matters is growth in DAUs. NoCode is just attractive because it propagates the myth that you can do things without programmers, and programmers are expensive. So you've got low friction + perceived lower cost == more users signing up.

mkrishnan 4y ago

Asp.net Forms and WinForms are much much much better rapid development tools than the kinds of bubble/retool etc. The issue is that lots of very young people have very limited set knowledge about the choices available to them.

Joe8Bit 4y ago

I do a fair amount of pre-seed and angel investing and I've seen a _massive_ increase in the number of very early businesses that have a "product" that they've been able to build with no/low code tools. It gives non-tech founders a set of options they've never had before, in my experience. That obviously isn't viable for all early businesses and even the ones it is viable for eventually need to hire engineering teams to build their products, but I love how much more accessible these tools have made shipping something basic.

shafyy 4y ago
I'm currently contracting for a client that uses a no-code tool to build their product, and this is exactly my opinion. If you're building a software startup, the only scenario where it makes sense to use a no-code tool (e.g., Bubble), is if you don't know to code. And even then, you will need to replace everything with proper code once you start growing. Of course, this is a bit different for low-code tools that are used internally etc.
upupandup 4y ago
Basically this space is deliver multiples on what engineer team would bring at multiple discounts. It's not really a sustainable model because they are constantly viewing it as a cost center even with the productivity no-code tools. So the moment some open source version is released or they see a cheaper solution they will flock to it especially if you allow easy migration. I've had requests from companies who were doing well with the no-code SaaS but felt they were being held hostage/realize they want an internal tool they own because their requireents always devolves past what no-code tool can do. This might not be an issue for SaaS who already publish their source code but for the vast majority of no-code/low code, it seems to cater to small to medium enterprises who are constantly looking to reduce their cost centers, even after achieving it an optimal setup.
eagleinparadise 4y ago
I am a non-tech founder building a app on building, basically very CRM/Data centric for a specific industry vertical I work in professionally. I am pushing Bubble to its limits where I have access to approx 150m records with all sorts of other database relationships to many millions of records. To build this app in a custom software solution, I have been quoted $100k to $500k depending on the backend architecture. Instead, I am spending around $20-30k in development costs to get my app off the ground to be able to pick up the first paying users... at least that's the goal and I'm a few weeks away from launch. I would also say that my "MVP" is not like Airbnb's MVP... my hope (and it seems) that it may be functional enough to nearly (70%) replace my existing CRM that I use day to day. Of course, I am planning to transition to a custom software solution once I validate, so I don't see bubble as a long term solution. I've self taught myself a bit of python and tried teaching myself JS as well off and on, so I am able to generally talk through with software developers what I'm trying to achieve and generally understand the technical things that might be discussed. So I'm not entirely a total non-technical noob. But the issue with Bubble is there is still a high barrier to actually learning how to use the platform for the average non tech person. It's a black box of sorts and they don't have the best education (unlike webflow). I mean come on, you have to pay $800 to take a bubble sponsored course? Lame. Nonetheless, you learn programming concepts by learning how to build on bubble. I'll end by replying to the top comment about code being perceived as complex. Spanish isn't complex. Nor is French. Maybe we can consider Japanese to be more complex. But even then, millions of people speak it just fine. Conjugations in Spanish are complex for a 40 year old English speaker new to Spanish but not complex for a 8 year old native speaker. But after a certain age, life takes hold, you begin working, and you lose the time and opportunity to spend 100's or 1,000's of hours learning another language. Trying to learn how to code is like this. I sometimes need to carve out 3-6 hours of a day to context-switch away from my busy (non-technical) professional & social life to get back into programming mode. Low code tools abstract away hours of that complexity you would have to learn, which allows you to start building something functional quicker than you otherwise would have. I know software devs look at low code and say "what's the matter with this crap, I can just spin up a X to do Y in 1 week, this is worthless!". But you are the native Spanish speaker in my metaphor, not the folks learning Spanish way past the days they had time to learn Spanish in college, trying to build the next greatest Spanish hit song to tell their story (i.e. software app!)

cbm-vic-20 4y ago

No. But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding". There are plenty of "no/low code" CRUD app builders, tools that manipulate components on a canvas to create web pages, even tools to integrate different systems together. But the second you need to go off the trail, you've now got a big problem: you're constrained to doing things that don't break the no/low code environment, and that's a lot harder than rolling your own components and customizations. Anything interesting enough to "disrupt" tech development will, almost by definition, not be possible in a no/low code environment.

haunter 4y ago
>But we will continue to see domain-specific tooling that require less "coding" 100% agreed Came up in another thread recently but Unreal Blueprints is a good example of that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's robust and perfectly fine, you can even build full games without any coding at all. Is it useful? Yes, but it would never replace "real" coding. Yet I'm excited to see any advancement on the field because it still feels like "magic" to some extent.
- tinco 4y ago
  Unreal Blueprints isn't low code, it's just code, and it doesn't need to replace "real" coding because it is real coding. It does raise the question where the line is. Something that I'd consider a low code / no code platform is webflow. My non programmer CEO used it to create our marketing website, and it solved something for us that normally is a very highly technical problem. He had a couple small visual glitches, he asked me to help and I discovered that it actually was a pretty thin abstraction layer over some good practice CSS, and so the glitches were easily fixed by me thanks to that. Blueprint makes a programming language easy enough to use that a non experienced programmer might have a go at it, but in the end it's really just the outstanding library that makes it so powerful, you still need programming skills to solve programming problems with it.
  - 4y ago

dboreham 4y ago

Looks for lollipop...

fnordpiglet 4y ago

My hope is that no code / low code disrupts the waiting for developers to have time to do stupid tedious stuff that changes randomly. My perception is the tech industry recruits a ton of people into it that aren’t particularly interested or suited to try to triage the amount of simplistic logical manipulation of data and processes that doesn’t require going through a full development cycle. By offloading some portion of that back to end users you can give them an inflection point to work without danger while keeping engineers focused on the complex parts of the system - and hopefully hire less people into tech teams who aren’t engineers.

mantis_shrimp 4y ago

As someone who got their start in tech with a low-code environment (ServiceNow reporting) I have found the true value of low code is the ability for business/ops teams to create tools that serve their needs without waiting on a team of "real" developers to make time for them. One of the biggest benefits is the sense of excitement this creates for these users as they are able to add the logic of programming into a process that was formerly a manual one. When they do reach their "edge" around low-code, they can then engage development teams with better knowledge about the system and a clearer vision for what they need. As other comments have said, low-code will always have trouble solving special cases due to their very nature of being simple and interchangeable. However, empowering others to solve these low hanging fruit problems liberates the develops from a backlog full of basic functionality and allows them to focus on the big problems that will require more robust tooling and design.

alexpotato 4y ago
I 100% agree on the savings of real developer time when end users can self service. At the same time, I've also seen users do incredibly crazy things because either they didn't know any better or just didn't bother to "read the code". Good example of this is people just keep creating Statuses in JIRA until you end up with "Which of these 264 'Completed' statuses is the one I want?". It's similar to the Ops person "Hey, I wrote a Perl script that does what I want. Yay!" that turns out to be a spaghetti ball of copy/pasta. This is maybe less of a point about programming and more about governance. Either way, you will still need specialized people who make sure that everything is being done in some kind of guardrails.
- alphager 4y ago
  > At the same time, I've also seen users do incredibly crazy things because either they didn't know any better or just didn't bother to "read the code". Good example of this is people just keep creating Statuses in JIRA until you end up with "Which of these 264 'Completed' statuses is the one I want?". Why is this a problem? Programs are a means to an end. The 264 Jira statuses are messy and could be done away with, but would a clean solution actually change anything for the better? In a significant, "it was worth spending the money on a real developer" way?

acjohnson55 4y ago

They already have, in many ways. Look at the "modern data stack" -- the idea that you can replace a ton of bespoke ETL platform and implementation with managed, low-code tools. It's been really successful. But this and other examples don't feel like disruption though because there's still an ever expanding universe of work that requires code.

alkonaut 4y ago

No. Not general purpose application development. Not ever. But niche applications or parts of applications might be. We see lots of “apps” that are spreadsheets or old access databases. In games/vfx and sound you see “shader graphs” and “audio pipelines” take over the job of code for parts of a codebase. Learning tools with puzzle pieces for code statements aren’t “low code” they are just an accessible way of writing regular code. The amount of code created is typically much larger and the complexity higher than with a regular language. Regular program code is the low complexity answer to general purpose software development.

smt88 4y ago

Yes, absolutely. I know firsthand. Instead of hiring developers to do a 2-month project to build us a suite of admin tools, I built them myself in Retool over the course of a couple of days. For a non-developer, maybe we're still far away from disruption. Excel seems to be the programming platform of choice for most people anyway. But for developers, these things turn you into RoboCop. It's amazing how much I can get done now that I don't have to worry about UI, build pipelines, etc.

char_star_star 4y ago
Thank you for expressing exactly what I’ve felt. In my experience something like Retool lets you spin up an incredible amount of functionality very quickly, and it also does a great job of helping you find the boundary where you should do something elsewhere. Honestly the hardest part of my work with Retool has been convincing other devs that they should use it for internal use cases. While they’re still waiting on designs to be done in Figma I’ve got multiple users trying out a solution in Retool that I can update in near real-time to see what works best.
yawnxyz 4y ago
I've used Retool as UI and Airtable as DB for so many tiny custom apps, it's great. Retool ends up being used to create "constraints" on top of Airtable in a way that enforces how people add / view records. It's such a great combo.

LABerthier 4y ago

No code is still code! https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/11/no-code-is-code/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/11/no-code-is-code/

garyclarke27 4y ago

I disagree with this opinion "Anyone marketing a low or no code tool to developers is targeting the wrong audience" Switched-on developers are a perfect market for good no-code/low-code tools. If a tool is 100 times more productive, why on earth would a smart developer not use it to deliver value to their customers?? I wrote a complete ERP and CRM system using our No-code platform - this would have been impossible for a single person using traditional tools such as Java. I've written a couple of blog posts explaining why the rise of No-Code/Low code is inevitable. https://www.onedb.online/blog/why_no_code_is_better_than_full_code https://www.onedb.online/blog/why_no_code_is_better_than_ful... https://www.onedb.online/blog/the_future_for_software_engineers_in_a_no_code_world https://www.onedb.online/blog/the_future_for_software_engine...

anonymoushn 4y ago
> this would have been impossible for a single person using traditional tools such as Java I don't think so?
- bogwog 4y ago
  When someone selling you a product makes claims like this that are bordering on gas lighting, that should raise some red flags.

spamizbad 4y ago

What happens to the software built with these tools when the no-code tooling company goes under? Do you have 30 days to port everything you did to something else before they turn it all off?

anotheryou 4y ago

I'd say yes, but not in the way you think. It's still programming, just a trying to be nice. Here and there it makes programming worse by e.g. not being very object oriented sometimes, but overall it always tries to make everything as high level as possible. High level programming languages on top of low level ones have been a hit ever since. The day I can plug together APIs and basic user management will be great: Make default user UI with login, profile, picture, make a twitter-style feed where everyone can subscribe to others. This I imagine possible within a day. Ideally you also wrap some APIs for me so I can e.g. take my existing twitter feed and do stuff with it. We are not too far from all that, but if you want to do one custom step you are back at jumping in to a lower level and need to build components yourself and it's just even more annoying :). It also has a way better chance with narrow use cases and is very successful there: chat bot builders, configuration of headless CMS admin UIs, analytics tools, KNIME even try machine learning and it looks wonderful.

sam0x17 4y ago

They are already. I consult for a lot of hyper-early-stage YC startups as they formulate their plans and I've had two separate clients in the past 6 months go the no-code route to build their MVP. At first I was against it, but having seen these clients go through it I would say it is much cheaper and less risky and gives developers an extremely good blueprint for when the founders inevitably decide to go beyond the MVP stage and build their own codebase. No-code platforms are a great way for non-technical (and even technical!) founders to do that hard product work of figuring out what they actually want their app to do and how each screen should work. Things like figma let you do this too, but I find founders will often make something in figma with logic holes or missing flows if they aren't thinking like an engineer. The no-code platforms force you to make these decisions because you'll notice the holes the moment you go to use the app instead of noticing them when your developers go to implement something that doesn't make sense. Much cheaper way to do early iteration.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
habeyer 4y ago
It was low-code for the back-end as well or just front-end? Back-end feels really risky to me, because visual logic builders are just so limiting compared to code.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  It depends on the application. In this case both clients were using a no-code system used by big fintech players like Goldman Sachs that costs $150k for a one year license.

jampa 4y ago

Depends on the use case. As someone without a lot of budget to hire devs, I currently use no code in my company extensively, our Airtable has 50 tables, some of them with > 10k records. There is certain excitement to do all in no-code now, but the ceiling is truly there as the article says, the rule of thumb is that if something is operational and not core for business we do in low code, if it is business critical (we lose money if goes down) then it gets coded. What happens if our business goes down, and is <low code tool> fault? We can't just say "welp" to our customers complaints, recently we saw that not even Atlassian is immune to long outages. Also what happens when the market needs for you to do "X" and the tool can't? Now you are stuck in a low-code environment with 3 months migration while the competitors pass ahead. We also got a lot of bugs with this tools on things that were supposed to work, and it slowed us down significantly. From what I see that the best use case of low code is kickstarting software projects. If done with the right tool (one that allows for easy exporting), it allows to get the data in order for future scaling with code. Since changing application logic in a living project (and even the entire language / framework) happens all the time, but the data generally does not, this seems like a best case scenario for a new feature or product that still needs to validate their market fit.

krishvs 4y ago

Having used low-code tools successfully to build ERP systems for the past few years. I feel low code tools can only really disrupt development once they solve the problem of requirements gathering from customers/ end users and also formally describe change management in low-code as well. As long as there is ambiguity in requirements - code or low code makes no difference.

char_star_star 4y ago
One thing I’ve found is that if you put something together in thirty minutes you’ll get much more detailed requirements because end users now have a tangible thing to organize their thoughts around.

PinkPigeon 4y ago

I've recently been building a business directory using Bubble.io. It took me about half a day to do tutorials and another half day playing around just to learn the platform. After that, I was able to build this business directory, including Stripe payment integration, some reasonably advanced Google Maps and search / categorisation functionality. Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so. I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS. Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly. At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it. It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it. If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot. Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning. I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.

otikik 4y ago

Eventually, yes. But we will be approaching AGIs at that point. On a shorter term, the disruption they can provide is similar to the one involving cryptocurrencies and blockchain: a lot of hype, grift, and few real applications.

nscalf 4y ago

For everyone saying no, this is exactly what Shopify, and arguably Wordpress are. These things have already disrupted tech development. I think the real question is how much complexity can they take on, and I think they’re largely near the end of that curve.

DAVer98 4y ago
Good point. Not too different to the application surface of AI where nocode is similiar to general AI but instead of aiming for that we're now learning to scope down to expert systems to see real gains.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I would suggest that they are more akin to "control panels," on complex machinery. Even "control panels," require a lot of training, for complex enough machinery. However, a great place to see well-written PHP, is inside the WordPress stack.
bogwog 4y ago
I think Wordpress is a great example. I recently tried making a simple website using Wordpress's visual layout editor, and it was absolute hell. The process consists of fighting with unlabeled icons, convoluted UI state that is controlled by mouse movements apparently, shit jumping around all over the place when you add/remove stuff, and a ton of other terrible UX decisions. It felt like I was trying to perform a satanic ritual with my mouse. I'm not a front end guy, but I was able to write exactly what I wanted directly in HTML/CSS in around 2-3 hours. That's for a static site with responsive layout and like 3 pages. Could someone who is actually in expert in Wordpress's editor do this in less than 3 hours? No doubt. But at the end of the day, all it cost me to build a vastly superior solution was a few hours (and again, I'm not an expert at frontend stuff at all, so that was not as fast as it could be done). Instead of having to host a bloated Wordpress site now, I just need to serve a few static HTML/CSS files, which can be done for free nowadays with a lot of providers. So the no code solution is more expensive to operate, and less efficient/performant. But at the same time, it doesn't require an expensive developer (even if an actual front-end dev would only need 1 billable hour at most)
4y ago

kohlerm 4y ago

deepdriver 4y ago

Unreal Engine Blueprints have been a game-changer for me personally, no pun intended. The rapid prototyping, API discoverability, and total immunity to 99% of dumb syntax errors which drag-and-drop visual programming provides has been a great help to learning Unreal. At the end of the day my ambitions are bigger than what I can efficiently build with Blueprints, but they're a great starting point for demos and small one-off applications.

goatcode 4y ago

Most developers I've interacted with have extreme limitations outside of their immediate expertise, and some (especially those who seem to be getting culled lately) are barely functional. With that, I'd suspect one of two possible futures: 1. Insufficient skill to make such automation work 2. A large enough number of people are capable of making this happen, and after that, everyone else('s career) dies. I for one welcome our new overlords.

daniel-thompson 4y ago

I tend to agree with Randall Munroe on this: > You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. (https://xkcd.com/568/ https://xkcd.com/568/)

mikkergp 4y ago
Totally agreed, really the goal of any programming whatever is to determine how easy is it to model the related logic. Low-code/No-code is not some magic bullet, it's just another way of doing it. The question has always been how well can you abstract certain well known logic. Rails makes it so you don't have to interact with networking primitives... Until you try in a way that doesn't match that. But there are a whole mess of crud apps in the world. The real thing that I think low code will hit up against is scale. Everyone in the world can write twitter in a CS 101 class, but scale means a closer connection between the business logic and the technical implementation and I think you'll run into the 9 foot ladder 10 foot wall problem. Low code/No Code will be increasingly useful at building larger and better apps, but the problem spaces and scale will continue to grow.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Sure. Lots of people who cant code can put together a squarespace site. I know a decent number of barbers or other small business owners who have nice looking websites they tossed together in a few hours.

jmull 4y ago

Well... for no/low code to take over everything, we'd need 10x the developers to create it all and then probably 20x the developers, in perpetuity, to handle the integrations. "Code" isn't an end to itself. Many developers spend their hours, days and careers trying to think of the simplest, clearest way to specify solutions to the problems they work on. Code (and data) is the best general thing we've been able to come up with. There can certainly be complexity arising from the code itself (more generally -- are you spending your time solving problems in the solution space or problem space?) but you need some way to deal with the complexity inherent to the problem. If there's a better way to do it than code, I'd be more than happy to jump on it. There are some good no/low code systems -- like spread sheets and some of the forms systems -- where they've found a powerful, flexible, yet simple enough abstraction. But these tend to form silos, and you need a ready escape hatch where the complexity of the underly problem exceeds the capability of the system (which is very common for anything useful).

fassssst 4y ago

I use them to great advantage as an engineering manager. If you have programming skills, you can use these tools to whip stuff up significantly faster than people without programming skills. It’s an organizational super power. I just replaced an internal web app used for planning with a data visualization tool dashboard that can spit out a spreadsheet for further analysis. Took a week to build something that solves the business problem better than several months of effort put into the web app did. I didn’t have to deal with auth, security and privacy reviews, building a custom UI that people would have to learn, learning data source API’s, or build/deployment.

char_star_star 4y ago
I’m increasingly of the opinion that if it doesn’t face customers it should be done using something like Retool. Especially considering that you can just plug it into your internal APIs so if you need to do anything particularly hairy you can still use your backend.

platz 4y ago

Sometimes you just need some IFFT-like actions triggered on some kind of event. In Azure stuff like Logic Apps / Power Automate is particularly geared to running actions based on events or recurrence schedules with minimal code.

Demonsult 4y ago

No code tools give people with no idea what they are doing a chance to prove it.

tut-urut-utut 4y ago

Well, no code and low code solutions are in practice more code. You use a tool, that is supposed to solve a trivial or a simple problem, and it works great until the first change requests come. With the second or third change request, the complexity is already so big, that no code is not a solution any more. But then, you have sunken costs, and no approval to rewrite. So, you keep adding a workaround around a workaround and another layer of patching or complexity, until a few years later you finally get an approval to ditch the no-code tool and rewrite using an actual code. In the end, cost and effort is much higher, than as if it were implemented properly in code from the beginning. You write a lesson learned, discuss it with the team and management, get an agreement to do it right the next time. Then, a week later, a new project starts, you want to do it in code, but get overridden because it's a perfect use case for this great low code or no code tool you are using. Source: every integration / middleware / ESB developer in every enterprise company.

Flankk 4y ago

Disrupt, yes. Replace, no. Programming is moving to ever higher levels of abstraction. It's just a continuation of the trend. You'll still have the lower levels when you need them. It reminds me of WordPress. It will get the job done for most people but at the end of the day it's a piece of crap.

lofatdairy 4y ago

I think no code/low code solutions certainly have a place, but the way they're currently designed is not necessarily helpful (I've worked on replacing integromat and automate.io solutions in the past). Those solutions are fine, for the most part, but they're main flaw is that in order to get anything done you have to integrate them with other tools/software, which means that you're limited by what parts of the api the developers exposed to the no-code. That and the abstractions they produce on the UI end can be confusing and difficult to navigate. That's less their fault and more of an outcome from being a shiny new tool trying to do everything, but it results in a solution that doesn't really work for the people who would go for a low-code solution in the first place. A good model in my mind is Excel. The amazing part of Excel is that it can be used as a no-code tool, a low code tool, and extended with code macros. Even self-described non-coders who would otherwise be intimidated often use to extreme productivity. It's extremely visual, straightforward, and self-contained for the most part. The fact that it's so well documented as well is also hugely important. The no code solutions I've seen and worked with usually are fairly lacking in this regard, but excel has fairly clear documentation, the famous f1 key, and a support line[^1] which makes it a more default choice. The only problem is that integrating it with your other tools relies on either 3rd party plugins, a coder, or integrating specifically w/ other ms software. [^1]: I had a professor state in a comparison between MATLAB and Python that the reason to choose MATLAB was that they had a customer support line. This wasn't a CS professor, so you shouldn't underestimate how much value is placed on talking to a human rather than RTFM by non-coders.

RajT88 4y ago
Excel wizards who consider themselves non-programmers, end up with what I would consider programming skills. And this is the rub with low/no-code solutions. To use them effectively, you have to have some programming skills already. They are perfect for lazy programmers, but less so for "Citizen Developers". At least, I haven't come across any I was really impressed with as a "Citizen Developer" platform. I would happily take references to any I should check out that might succeed at enabling non-coders to build production solutions.
- lofatdairy 4y ago

rzwitserloot 4y ago

Most comments here are in agreement that a ton of programming is doing complicated things, and the complicated part is not "which letters do I press on this keyboard to make code loop a few times". Hence, low-code tools don't solve the right complexity problem. So let's move beyond that. We've all been there, from time to time you have a database table or whatnot that "makes sense" (its columns closely match what users of the software expect to see), and you really just need to expose CRUD operations, add half a page worth of validation and action buttons and then the app is done. (CRUD = standard db ops; CREATE, SELECT (Read), UPDATE, DELETE). Why is the 'low-code automatisation' of that part wavering in and out of popularity? low-code solutions _can_ capture away the right kind of complexity here, no? And it's been tried. In many forms. Many times. In the 90s, 'database-oriented software development' was very popular. FoxPro, MS Access, xbase, that sort of thing. You got the CRUD stuff for free, and all you were really doing was designing forms to lay out the various DB columns and maybe adding special scripted actions to certain buttons. That was pretty much it, already quite low code and trying to, I dunno, turn those scripts into more lego-brick-style low-code solutions seems feasible at that point, too. The development environment was all in on this. The basic interface was a form designer. Then you'd click on a button in the form and 'add an action listener'. The other main view is your columns and tables view where you can click on things to 'add change listeners'. You blessed some form view as the 'main view' which loaded on app start, and that's how you build an app. But FoxPro, MSAccess, that sort of stuff mostly died out. The vast majority of software, both consumer and business oriented, is written in java, python, C#, javascript - those sorts of languages. General languages where database support isn't even baked in - you need to add a dependency no less. The concept was then reinvented: Rails (Ruby-on-Rails) with the notion of 'skeleton' generation, which didn't just generate the barest of bones ("Here is the source file containing the entry point, here is a project definition and all you need to do is edit the names") - but did a lot more than that, giving you a basic but functionally styled web interface for CRUD ops. The development 'model' of rails is then to just add new features and endpoints, and perhaps even replace these CRUD pages one day, until you're happy with your app. But rails is far less popular today than it used to be, and whilst various web frameworks still offer really easy ways to toss up CRUD operations, it seems to me like it's less of a key feature, and various frameworks that don't have it or whose CRUD support seems like an afterthought are still quite popular. Direct rails clones in other languages, such as Grails (for java), have pretty much died out. Why? It's the fact that "the low code experiment has been tried a ton of times and it has failed every time" that teaches me that low-code is doomed to fail. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain _why_ it fails. Just that it is likely to.

catwind7 4y ago

This line stood out to me: > “As it stands now, there seems to be a tradeoff between ease-of-use and control, and until someone figures out how to remove that tradeoff, there will always be a need for engineers who can fully manipulate software to meet the full range of use cases businesses (and individuals) need.” we're constantly making this type of tradeoff as developers. It's not just a decision we make at the beginning of a project where we look at the requirements and say hey no-code might be the way to go here. have you written a function for a library to hide information / details of how something works? that's a tradeoff between ease and control for the client. now expose that through a GUI with some params and now you have "no-code". sometimes that's ok. it's nice to have options!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

robswc 4y ago

To a degree... but the problem with a lot of "low/no-code" is the people using it, lol. I'm not a musician, so even with better/different tools, I can't compose a good song. Same goes for a lot of low-code solutions I've come across. The design/architecture causes a lot of problems. The big ones I've seen are ppl designing without thinking about side effects and responsibility of "modules." I'm probably bias though, as I do contract work that is 99% replacing low-code solutions with something proprietary. I think it works out pretty good though. They usually have some sort of system in place and "working." Makes my job a lot easier as you can see the "shape" of their intent. There's always going to be one or two things that bother a PM to the point of switching to some proprietary solution ;)

Brushfire 4y ago

Lol, this whole discussion is like a bunch of architects talking about how folks shouldn't do DIY projects on their own, and yet... DIY is a huge thing because most people are actually reasonably intelligent and capable of doing things on their own.

oneaaronofmany 4y ago

Will compiled languages ever truly disrupt writing assembly code?

nuncanada 4y ago

TL;DR: I spoke with a lot of people in the industry and thus came to the conclusion that X will not be disruptive... The good part of the bet is that most potential disruptions end not happening... But the exactly same median consensus is also reached about the disruptions that do end happening...

Quarrelsome 4y ago

The amount of effort we put into people who refuse to learn to script to allow them to perform complex tasks feels like such a waste. I've seen in my industry, we used to spend ages making the most ridiculously complicated front-ends for complex tasks. Now finally we're starting to accept that these orgs will have people who can smack out a bit of Python and suddenly we get to stop wasting our time and focus on supporting those who accept they have to code. No code/low code will always remain toy and brittle outside of demo-esqe use-cases and those who are willing to open a file in notepad and tinker will retain a significant advantage over the rest.

webignition 4y ago

I agree with the sentiments regarding the use of low-code/no-code tools for general purpose programming. I'd like to present a specific use case as an example of how domain-specific no-code tools can help. I'm developing a tool for automated browser testing. This fits well into the description of being no-code and is being developed as an alternative to writing C#- or Java-based browser automation tests in Selenium. The "code" that you write is more akin to configuration that defines what page elements you want to interact with, how you want to interact with them and what you expect to happen. There's more to it than that, but this is not a sales pitch. My project is in direct response to the experiences my partner encountered when providing browser automation training to manual testers within businesses. Browser automation testing requires, in broad terms, a small subset of what is offered by C# or Java, however a significant understanding of and familiarity with matters such as objects, variables, sane naming and debugging is required to even begin reaching competence. Many manual web testers, who were very capable, were just not able to grasp coding matters sufficiently. Many were, but plenty were not. For those that barely could, I feel for the people who have to maintain what would then have been created in their businesses. Programming that requires only a subset of a general-purpose programming language has the capacity of being implemented in a no-code tool if the scope of the programming needs are narrow.

excitom 4y ago

Once you have tools that let someone with no skills build a product, you get a product that works like it was built by someone with no skills.

brandonmenc 4y ago

They have been ever since VisiCalc.

gumby 4y ago

They already have and will continue to. Most programmers don’t even think about their machine’s internal circuitry, much less know how a circuit works. They put their attention on other things. The ability to assemble 60%, 80%, even 100% of a simple application by snapping together building blocks has lead to a massive democraticratization of programming. Yes, and buggy crap and security holes, but it’s easier to fix some of them by improving the Lego bricks. This is a triumph of abstraction. == The first “no code” system I ever saw was called, IIRC, “eve” at some PC expo back around 1981. There was a bit of buzz in the press and then that was the end of it. Then again, that was the promise of FORTRAN (and then COBOL). BTW the article itself was meandering and mushy. I gave up on it.

drbojingle 4y ago

Essentually asking "can newer tech become easier to use and more accessible". The answer is yes. Ive seen juniors struggle with django but make quick progress with hasura. I know plenty of developers who still dont use snippets. As far as im concerned to say that low code or no code couldnt disrupt tech is to say that software can't become easier to make or more accessible to people out of collage which i dont believe. Big problem these days is that tech has become more complex because we make it more complex. It doesnt always have to be that way. Enforcing good taste will be an interesting challange but just like easy to use guns made archery redudant for war, easy to use low code/no code tools will help take care of the urgent issues that arent important. That'll free up dev time for other things.

shudza 4y ago

No-code only works for MVPs, landing pages, and generally projects that are being bootstraped which are not tech-specific. You can have a solution using no-code at roughly 20% the price of hiring a developer to do it from scratch.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I think it's useful to flip the script a bit and ask this question: why are software developers so often stuck writing software with their only abstraction available being text? Isn't that working with one hand tied behind their back? I do a lot of work in geometric tools, and the fact that the best thing that we have for unit tests is to painstakingly construct objects by specifying their coordinate space hurts. Our team gained a lot of velocity on building and maintaining unit tests by simply writing a tiny graphical tool to convert back and forth between a text representation of a coordinate space and a visual representation, because visual presentation is far better for the average human than a text description for a bunch of circles and rectangles. The signal gets lost in the noise. I also still think there's meat on the bones of tooling that makes it harder or impossible to craft invalid programs. When we're editing text files, a modern IDE will throw some red underlines under the text when we've written something that it knows won't compile, which is a massive step in the right direction. But contrast that with humble Scratch, which makes it structurally impossible to write an invalid program as you go (incomplete, yes, but an incomplete program is obvious because it will have unfilled slots). I wonder sometimes if tooling that treated the syntactic components of a language as things, not strings, would actually allow developers to move faster with some training.

zozbot234 4y ago
Structural editors are not a new idea. They have well-known drawbacks wrt. supporting incremental editing of program text, which as a rule requires "passing through" invalid representations. This actually makes them quite unintuitive for such tasks. OTOH, modern editing tools, such as "language servers", provide most of the advantages without the aforementioned issues.

tjpnz 4y ago

I'm not worried, if anything I can see the latest crop of tools creating additional opportunities for traditional developers. I know of freelancers who get a lot of work lifting and shifting previously successful lc/nc solutions developed in Excel or Access.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tailspin2019 4y ago

Yes. As technology progresses, in general, we tend to create and move up into new layers of abstraction. This is one of them. At the same time, "traditional" software development isn't going anywhere soon. In the short to medium term it may even become more valuable and sought after because an increasing number of technically minded people will enter the market at this new level of abstraction and never learn traditional software development at all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I've seen no/low code stuff for pretty much the entirety of my career (going back into the 1980s). Execs seem to love them. They never seem to go far. I am not speculating on why they never make it. It's easy to see why execs love them.

guhcampos 4y ago

They already did. Stuff like IFTTT, Zappier and Slack Workflows are extremely valuable for most non trivial organizations. We just keep looking at this from a developer perspective, but from a business perspective it's there.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

Low/no code tools stove the wrong problem. The problem we should be solving is not the accessibility of code itself, but the accessibility of toolchains. The most confusing thing about learning to make software isn't writing a Hello World program or a Fibonacci series loop. It's figuring out what to do with that code once it's written. People don't interact with terminals and shells anymore, but guess what nearly every Hello World program is written for? A shell. We have a lot of tools that try to hide the toolchain, and even the shell itself, from the uninitiated developer. Unfortunately, hiding the complexity of the very system you are writing code for causes more problems than it solves. How can you learn to get input from the user if you don't even know how to use a shell? How can you start using libraries if you don't know where they are, or how they are distributed to the user? How do you configure the correct environment variables if you don't even know what shell you are running or how/where it was initialized? We should instead be doing the inverse: do everything we can to show new programmers the system they are using. Show them all the pieces of the puzzle, and how those pieces fit together, because our new programmer's primary goal is to make new puzzle pieces.

quantum_state 4y ago

Similar attempts occurred b4. Without addressing the real root causes, it will create yet another mess.

htrp 4y ago

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

arijo 4y ago

I've heard of companies organising the low code department under UI/UX. Any explanation for this?

agustinbena 4y ago

Did ever Visual Basic back in the 90's disrupt tech? Not that much. It certainly back then allowed a lot of people with low skill/experience in dev to jump in development. Was an inclusive tool but not revolutionary. Tools like github copilot gives us a glimpse of how will be the tool that will revolutionize tech dev on day in the future IMHO.

atlgator 4y ago

Maybe this is inexperience on my part, but the LCNC tools I've used are very clunky, with UIs that are plain at best, and performance that is cumbersome. While there is certainly a place for them in the business world, I can't see them replacing a really snappy, custom product with beautiful and intuitive UX/UI.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Pete-Codes 4y ago

I just keep hearing "no code is the future!" from people who sell no-code courses

jrm4 4y ago

That's a lot of hopium here. The problem (around here) is that the sort of people who write these blogs and/or frequent Hacker News mostly would be harmed by this kind of development. I wouldn't. Bring on the new Hypercard.

cm2187 4y ago

My experience is that the people for whom learning a bit if SQL is a bridge too far, will also not invest time into learning some complex automation software. And these no/low code software all look like complicated electrical diagrams when you are doing real life workflows. The category of people who are ready to invest time in understanding those tools are the people who might as well spend the same time or less learning SQL and maybe a bit of python or VBA. As for business users doing code, I wish there were more, and I think younger users tend to be a bit more technical, but it's a light breeze, not a big change.

29athrowaway 4y ago

"Homepage generators" and "website builders" appeared shortly after web browsers. Almost 3 decades later, people still have jobs writing HTML and CSS.

bobowzki 4y ago

No.

ramoz 4y ago

No code is for mundane human processes and commodity development you want to get done cheaply, whether internal or outsourced. That’s already been disrupted by major platforms. These smaller platforms can only ever dream of becoming the next service now, appian, Salesforce, pega, etc. Anyone who stays near to, or on, the bleeding edge of technology will know that no-code isn’t a real thing for them. Add some extra automation and boilerplate capabilities by all means, but software will always eat software.

newbieuser 4y ago

Are companies willing to pay for no code tools? Do you know a company that spends money on these tools?

thingification 4y ago

I can't seem to find people in this thread talking about AI/ML, which surprised me. For "enterprise software", I imagine a future of domain experts training/instructing AI minions to do things like process sale orders and returns - like the office clerks of the past, but silicon clerks. And if that, why not consumer apps etc. too? The next "everything is bloated electron apps" is "everything is bloated AI models" ?-)

fatbird 4y ago

At my workplace, one of our common sayings is “when you’re doing badly, users complain about bugs; when you’re doing well, they’re complaining about missing features.” From 1998 to 2004 I worked as the IT manager at a plastics manufacturer whose entire system was backed by SQL Server, and fronted by MS Access databases that people ran locally for the forms and reports (no data was stored in them) or Excel (same thing). This is low-code in a nutshell and it worked well back then: it was CRUD before websites were CRUD. And we were constantly developing it and building out more complex scenarios for industrial production control and accounting and reporting. Why? Because it worked, it allowed users to conceive of the next thing they could use, which inevitably led out of low-code scenarios. At one point we seriously investigated hiring trying to implement bin-packing algorithms in VBA so that warehouse pickers had better direction in order assembly. Low code systems either don’t work, or they do and create demand for “high code” solutions.

kizer 4y ago

Don't forget that stack overflow has an interest in developers continuing to use code!

analog31 4y ago

I call it the one page problem, which is how you represent something that's bigger than one page. Code and math notation attack this problem by design. All other tools try to do it as an afterthought, or not at all.

mr_coleman 4y ago

They already have. My career started making websites that are now made in Wordpress. Look at Salesforce and Sharepoint.

999900000999 4y ago

What I really like is visual scripting which compiles to code, that you can then edit and use for your application. There's a plug-in for blender called Armory which does this. It's only for game development, but I think something like that could really revolutionize software development. Let people drag and drop, and customize.

sorokod 4y ago

For me an interesting question would be: "How would a niech, low code tools can comfortably fill, looks like?"

habeyer 4y ago

Low/no-code tools as replacements for devs is never going to happen. But as an "aid" to empower developers... absolutely. The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious which is generally a good target for disruptive automation. Of course one of the big challenges will be that devs are most comfortable coding in text-heavy non-GUI environments like the IDE or terminal, and any low-code tooling that leans on a visual interface is going to struggle. This was actually a huge problem for me at https://rapidream.com https://rapidream.com (apologies for the shameless plug). I wanted a Figma-to-React dev-tool that I could actually use on my real "day-job" projects, but designing an interface and user flow for users who don't like low-codey tooling was almost a bigger challenge then the actual tech.

schwartzworld 4y ago
> The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious. I think the take that frontend isn't hard is extremely outdated. Responsiveness and a11y are nuanced problems with huge surface areas. As designs get more complex, keeping all these things in check requires tooling that needs to be learned. People on HN constantly bemoan the complexity of frontend development and how hard it has become. There's a reason drag and drop isn't the default way of creating a web page, despite tools for this being around for 30 years.
- habeyer 4y ago
  I misspoke. It's not Front-End dev as a whole, just the "pushing-pixels" stuff. There's a ton of difficult FE work (esp. state). It's just that when it comes to a lot of the "basic" styling and responsiveness there's a lot of tedious work that should be automate-able (just like any framework or library, the goal is to reduce unnecessary work, not to suggest that the work is trivial).

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

I'm going to bang my "software is a form of literacy" drum again. No-code is a "solution" to illiteracy. It is (snarky example alert) like taking all the cells in all the Marvel comics, cutting them out singly and arranging them in order (punch, horror, fly) and saying "now you too can write a story" Yeah kind of. But what we need is not No-Code. what we need are two things - more people who learn to code, and companies that make their data and processes accessible to code. But it's like trying to start a marketplace - you need to attract the buyers and the sellers at the same time

darepublic 4y ago

I have twice now built in-house low code interfaces for companies. A recurring problem is when the same product manager who requested the low code interfaces turns around and created a bunch of stories that go beyond the limits of said interface. It's like they ask me to build a high performance racing car and then on race day they bring me to an off road dirt trail.