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Your absolute best way to make a programmer productive is to give domain experts the tools to build an executable prototype themselves. This was the true value

Your absolute best way to make a programmer productive is to give domain experts the tools to build an executable prototype themselves. This was the true value of Hypercard, GW Basic, Visual Basic 6, Office/VBA, Excel, Delphi, etc. They know what the actual details required for the inputs and outputs are, along with all the means to do the computations. Once they give you something that works (no matter how slow or kludgy), you have an executable specification to refactor, or rewrite, and you can A/B test to make sure your code works correctly compared to their reference/spec. You spend some valuable time on the part of the experts, but you more than make up for it in saved time doing the wrong thing across possibly years.

erlich 3y ago
In my experience, the experts love to get their hands dirty and make things. Devs are gatekeeping way too much. More no-code/low-code is the way forward. It's always just a balance of how much abstraction to add.
- majesticglue 3y ago
  for prototyping or building the actual product? No-code/low-code tools are great for prototypes, but are awful for software that is large enough. for small businesses many will not get to that point because many businesses sink by that time, but absolutely unusable for many enterprise software. Those solutions slow down devs past a certain level of complexity (and that level isn't all that high) but no-code/low-code experts will either not know any better or won't tell you. I have legitimately tried using a few, but they become a pain to work it beyond the initial prototype. I put them in the similar territory as Wordpress because they remind me of the pain of maintaining them. Non-devs always underestimate complexity of software at scale. Even devs do as well. It's not gatekeeping otherwise, devs would already be out of a job

erlich 3y ago

In my experience, the experts love to get their hands dirty and make things. Devs are gatekeeping way too much. More no-code/low-code is the way forward. It's always just a balance of how much abstraction to add.

majesticglue 3y ago
for prototyping or building the actual product? No-code/low-code tools are great for prototypes, but are awful for software that is large enough. for small businesses many will not get to that point because many businesses sink by that time, but absolutely unusable for many enterprise software. Those solutions slow down devs past a certain level of complexity (and that level isn't all that high) but no-code/low-code experts will either not know any better or won't tell you. I have legitimately tried using a few, but they become a pain to work it beyond the initial prototype. I put them in the similar territory as Wordpress because they remind me of the pain of maintaining them. Non-devs always underestimate complexity of software at scale. Even devs do as well. It's not gatekeeping otherwise, devs would already be out of a job