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I've worked pretty extensively with custom low-code stuff, but not for anything particularly technically ambitious. I use it for simple unambitious systems in

I've worked pretty extensively with custom low-code stuff, but not for anything particularly technically ambitious. I use it for simple unambitious systems in room escapes and similar, in situations where you want to be able to monitor the state of a system and make changes on the fly. The low code framework adds lots of debugging, monitoring, and logging hooks. The system is very explicitly not meant to ever support any real programming. You can't even create reusable functions, there's just IFTT style rules and Excel inspired =expressions. Anything beyond that, Python already does, and I don't wanna design a new DIY general language. I think low-code has a lot of potential, as a way to connect pieces of existing code. Things like VVVV and Excel are really nice. But when it tries to be as general as code, it has to be careful not to just become.... code. I'll choose the common well known language over the "just right" special purpose language every time. To me, Excel is the premier example of low-code success. It covers it's range of use cases very well with just a few high level primitives. The interesting part isn't exactly the language although the way that they have a fairly standard and compatible batteries-included library is nice, it's the premade structure and tools optimized to work with that structure. It's real "software" not a pure diy software kit.

jarirajari 3y ago
Thank you for your response! I too think that Excel is a premier example of low-code success: especially if you think that who is it low-code for - business people. Many times I find technical people (me too) engaging these low-code discussions so that they forget that low-code and no-code should be powerful enough to bring power of programming to groups of non-technical people. In my case, I wanted to start with Excel functions, but it could be valuable to add even more functions. And to be able to write these functions in a different way than Excel does is what I am after: think of it as sequences of functions instead of placing them inside cells. Another thing is that you can't really run Excel as a backend i.e. without human intervention. Or well, there are nowadays some tools for that too, but that gets quite technical quickly.

jarirajari 3y ago

Thank you for your response! I too think that Excel is a premier example of low-code success: especially if you think that who is it low-code for - business people. Many times I find technical people (me too) engaging these low-code discussions so that they forget that low-code and no-code should be powerful enough to bring power of programming to groups of non-technical people. In my case, I wanted to start with Excel functions, but it could be valuable to add even more functions. And to be able to write these functions in a different way than Excel does is what I am after: think of it as sequences of functions instead of placing them inside cells. Another thing is that you can't really run Excel as a backend i.e. without human intervention. Or well, there are nowadays some tools for that too, but that gets quite technical quickly.