12 ms·

Every visual workflow tool is just Excel for developers who gave up

76 points by dalibenothmen 1y ago

taeric 1y ago
I'm super sympathetic to this. Used to cynically point out that Excel was the most popular "notebook like" interface for computers. That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read. After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things. My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.
- diflartle 1y ago
  > There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read. I'd love to read this, but can't seem to find it. Any idea where I could find it at?
  - Something1234 1y ago
    I think it’s an outtake from the “You suck at excel talk” by Joel Spoelsky
    - taeric 1y ago
      I can't find where I thought I read this. I'm assuming I must have seen a transcript of this speech, once? Regardless, I'm fairly confident this is what I was remembering. Thanks!
daft_pink 1y ago
I feel the real problem with excel is that it’s not reusable. Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks. Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Excel is high level assembly. Immediately executable, worthless on other platforms without reverse engineering.
  - daft_pink 1y ago
    I don't mean reusing excel formulas on other platforms. I mean if you write a really long formula in a cell, it's not really practical to use that formula in another workbook that doesn't have the exact same structure. If you compare that to say a Jupyter notebook which is cell based, you can at least reuse your function in another notebook or cell within any other jupyter notebook rapidly and quickly if you wrote it correctly. Excel not so much.
    - narcraft 1y ago
      You can have named ranges and cells in Excel, and Excel even has lambda/anonymous functions now. So in latest editions of excel functions can be as general or brittle as they are in any other language or environment, it just depends on how they're written.
- sas224dbm 1y ago
  of course it's re-usable .. most passionate excel jockeys would agree, as long it's their VBA that gets reused
throwforfeds 1y ago
In my experience orgs choose these low code tools because good engineers are expensive and many don't fundamentally understand the process of software development. I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span. So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.
- hobs 1y ago
  Yup, but this time its their choice that one upped the supposed experts, so they cling to buying Marc island for at least 5 years.
wiradikusuma 1y ago
Weird, my fellow developers usually don't advocate visual tools like Zapier, but instead roll their own solution (non-visual). Which, to be honest, comes with its own problems.
ajcp 1y ago
I believe the writer is comparing local visual workflow programs against local Excel workbooks, that is: personal productivity tools run on a users local machine. This is a very important distinction. The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.
- eawgewag 1y ago
  Yes, absolutely. The reason why my startup uses Zapier isn't because we prefer to use no-code to orchestrate this specific workflow. It's because it's faster than building out all the webhooks, routers, integrations, tables, etc necessary to make this workflow work, stuff that Zapier already natively supports
  - ajcp 1y ago
    I would highly recommend looking into n8n if you're digging Zapier.
nyeah 1y ago
It would be neat if we could divide programming into (a) software development; (b) other labor-saving automation that's less serious. When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".) Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.
haswell 1y ago
In a past life, I ran a tools/operations team at a big company for years and later was the product manager for a visual workflow/integration product for a number of years. I've been the IT department trying to manage the crazy things people in the org build, and later worked with hundreds of customers who wanted visual workflow tools for a long list of reasons that have very little to do with what this blog post describes. I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position. > Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy. While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice. > Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared. These tools are succeeding because: - They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team - They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity - They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc. Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening. And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win. It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline. These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.
jdauriemma 1y ago
Excel is one of the most successful pieces of software of all time, so it's an odd choice for a punching bag. Plus, the tone of this article is (unintentionally, I'm sure) off-putting, particularly: > You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it... It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost. > ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it? I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up. For these reasons I think your analogy is not effective. I don't disagree with your thesis, though; I prefer code in almost all cases. But that's just me. I know for certain, though, that if I had stock options in that company in this hypothetical scenario I'd rather keep Karen around than whoever fixes the VLOOKUP syntax. And if visual tools are what empowers Karen... well, there you go.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  I too never get the Excel hate. Without Excel-what do you expect non programmers to do? They sit in front of a computer all day long-would you prefer they use paper? Official IT resources are a joke and will never deliver something so understandable and malleable as Excel. Sure, the official IT app may be done the right way, but it will quickly become outdated as business processes change and the maintenance budget disappears.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    I mean I hate Excel - for me. Not for anyone else. I think it is a great piece of software and I only wish I could make something as successful. But I definitely hate working with it.
- 1y ago
Ezhik 1y ago
If anything we need more Excels. Excel is coding for people who don't even know they're coding. Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  More excels and more improvements to debugging excel please (: The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.
  - afiori 1y ago
    In this spirit excel would be way easier to debug if you could easily show the value of subexpressions in complex formulas
- thingsilearned 1y ago
  Yeah, isn't the main user of those tools non-developers? It's not that developers are getting lazy, it's that people who aren't developers also have technical needs (and some chops).
  - nyeah 1y ago
    Not all reasonable-sounding developer complaints are legitimate business complaints. For example technical debt is bad, but there are much worse scenarios. For example consider "no customer." (Not picking on developers in particular. Similar story applies to salespeople, lawyers, technicians, scientists, accountants, or anybody else.)
- dalibenothmen 1y ago
  Totally agree. Excel is incredibly powerful, and people like Karen are doing real development, whether they realize it or not. My point wasn’t that Excel (or visual tools) are bad, it’s that when systems grow in complexity, they eventually need the same discipline, clarity, and maintainability that code provides. And that’s where things can get messy if we’re not careful.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mont_tag 1y ago
A notable exception is MS Access. It was a huge productivity win. It did not work well with version control but otherwise, it let developers rapidly develop and maintain moderate sized solutions to common business problems. It was also extensible with plain text code when needed.
mont_tag 1y ago
One place where Visual development tools almost always win is in problem domains that are intrinsically visual (think CAD, form designers, etc)
moomoo11 1y ago
Excel is probably the only software I consider “perfect” and that is saying a lot imo.
test6554 1y ago
This is a bit like getting mad that Adam Sandler made another movie. It costs you nothing that stuff other people like exists. Don't waste energy on it.
skeledrew 1y ago
I agree that devs (and everyone else) are fundamentally lazy. I don't agree with the scared. People would rather spend time on things that bring them joy, and that thing which made them excited to work with Company X might be no more, or a whole other thing altogether, 6 months later. But they still need that paycheck, so they do what they can to offset the increasing pain and displeasure so they can continue. The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution. And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.
altairprime 1y ago
This article is missing something important: businesses are adopting these services in order to lower the required skill level of their headcount roles. If they can outsource the work to a worse product that is barely fit for purposes while reducing the pay and tier of the headcount associated with maintaining it, then that’s a total win so long as flexibility and resilience are lower priority than increasing profits by replacing a high-skilled programmer with a low-skilled worker.
junto 1y ago
In every project I’ve seen where someone has evangelized a visual workflow designer (bar none), the overriding argument has been that “power users”, can “manage” the business workflows. In every project the business users have no interest in “managing” business workflows, so the developers that built the tool end up having to use the tool for them, implementing their business use cases. Developers are much more comfortable with code. You cannot easily unit test visual workflow designers. You cannot easily version or put visual workflow designs into source control. Whenever I see one of these projects I run screaming in the opposite direction. Locode in general is an anti pattern. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, aka. Microsoft Access Online I would like to be able to upvote this post 100 times.
- dalibenothmen 1y ago
  Absolutely agree! I’ve seen the same thing happen. The idea that “power users” will manage workflows sounds great on paper, but in reality, it always falls back on developers. And once things get even slightly complex, I end up writing custom scripts anyway because the visual tools just can’t handle it cleanly. At that point, you’re stuck using a tool that’s harder to debug, test, or version and still coding on the side. Totally with you on this being an anti-pattern in most serious use cases.
BoredPositron 1y ago
You can brute force via visual workflow tools and it will look impressive to your coworkers because of all the noodles. It's performative like all the shit people did in excel in the 90s.
eezing 1y ago
With AI, this is about to get a whole lot worse.

76 points by dalibenothmen 1y ago

I'm super sympathetic to this. Used to cynically point out that Excel was the most popular "notebook like" interface for computers. That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read. After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things. My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.

diflartle 1y ago
> There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read. I'd love to read this, but can't seem to find it. Any idea where I could find it at?
- Something1234 1y ago
  I think it’s an outtake from the “You suck at excel talk” by Joel Spoelsky
  - taeric 1y ago
    I can't find where I thought I read this. I'm assuming I must have seen a transcript of this speech, once? Regardless, I'm fairly confident this is what I was remembering. Thanks!

daft_pink 1y ago

I feel the real problem with excel is that it’s not reusable. Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks. Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.

skydhash 1y ago
Excel is high level assembly. Immediately executable, worthless on other platforms without reverse engineering.
- daft_pink 1y ago
  I don't mean reusing excel formulas on other platforms. I mean if you write a really long formula in a cell, it's not really practical to use that formula in another workbook that doesn't have the exact same structure. If you compare that to say a Jupyter notebook which is cell based, you can at least reuse your function in another notebook or cell within any other jupyter notebook rapidly and quickly if you wrote it correctly. Excel not so much.
  - narcraft 1y ago
    You can have named ranges and cells in Excel, and Excel even has lambda/anonymous functions now. So in latest editions of excel functions can be as general or brittle as they are in any other language or environment, it just depends on how they're written.
sas224dbm 1y ago
of course it's re-usable .. most passionate excel jockeys would agree, as long it's their VBA that gets reused

throwforfeds 1y ago

In my experience orgs choose these low code tools because good engineers are expensive and many don't fundamentally understand the process of software development. I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span. So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.

hobs 1y ago
Yup, but this time its their choice that one upped the supposed experts, so they cling to buying Marc island for at least 5 years.

wiradikusuma 1y ago

Weird, my fellow developers usually don't advocate visual tools like Zapier, but instead roll their own solution (non-visual). Which, to be honest, comes with its own problems.

ajcp 1y ago

I believe the writer is comparing local visual workflow programs against local Excel workbooks, that is: personal productivity tools run on a users local machine. This is a very important distinction. The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.

eawgewag 1y ago
Yes, absolutely. The reason why my startup uses Zapier isn't because we prefer to use no-code to orchestrate this specific workflow. It's because it's faster than building out all the webhooks, routers, integrations, tables, etc necessary to make this workflow work, stuff that Zapier already natively supports
- ajcp 1y ago
  I would highly recommend looking into n8n if you're digging Zapier.

nyeah 1y ago

It would be neat if we could divide programming into (a) software development; (b) other labor-saving automation that's less serious. When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".) Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.

haswell 1y ago

In a past life, I ran a tools/operations team at a big company for years and later was the product manager for a visual workflow/integration product for a number of years. I've been the IT department trying to manage the crazy things people in the org build, and later worked with hundreds of customers who wanted visual workflow tools for a long list of reasons that have very little to do with what this blog post describes. I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position. > Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy. While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice. > Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared. These tools are succeeding because: - They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team - They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity - They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc. Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening. And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win. It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline. These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.

jdauriemma 1y ago

Excel is one of the most successful pieces of software of all time, so it's an odd choice for a punching bag. Plus, the tone of this article is (unintentionally, I'm sure) off-putting, particularly: > You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it... It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost. > ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it? I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up. For these reasons I think your analogy is not effective. I don't disagree with your thesis, though; I prefer code in almost all cases. But that's just me. I know for certain, though, that if I had stock options in that company in this hypothetical scenario I'd rather keep Karen around than whoever fixes the VLOOKUP syntax. And if visual tools are what empowers Karen... well, there you go.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
I too never get the Excel hate. Without Excel-what do you expect non programmers to do? They sit in front of a computer all day long-would you prefer they use paper? Official IT resources are a joke and will never deliver something so understandable and malleable as Excel. Sure, the official IT app may be done the right way, but it will quickly become outdated as business processes change and the maintenance budget disappears.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  I mean I hate Excel - for me. Not for anyone else. I think it is a great piece of software and I only wish I could make something as successful. But I definitely hate working with it.
1y ago

Ezhik 1y ago

If anything we need more Excels. Excel is coding for people who don't even know they're coding. Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?

recursivecaveat 1y ago
More excels and more improvements to debugging excel please (: The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.
- afiori 1y ago
  In this spirit excel would be way easier to debug if you could easily show the value of subexpressions in complex formulas
thingsilearned 1y ago
Yeah, isn't the main user of those tools non-developers? It's not that developers are getting lazy, it's that people who aren't developers also have technical needs (and some chops).
- nyeah 1y ago
  Not all reasonable-sounding developer complaints are legitimate business complaints. For example technical debt is bad, but there are much worse scenarios. For example consider "no customer." (Not picking on developers in particular. Similar story applies to salespeople, lawyers, technicians, scientists, accountants, or anybody else.)
dalibenothmen 1y ago
Totally agree. Excel is incredibly powerful, and people like Karen are doing real development, whether they realize it or not. My point wasn’t that Excel (or visual tools) are bad, it’s that when systems grow in complexity, they eventually need the same discipline, clarity, and maintainability that code provides. And that’s where things can get messy if we’re not careful.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mont_tag 1y ago

A notable exception is MS Access. It was a huge productivity win. It did not work well with version control but otherwise, it let developers rapidly develop and maintain moderate sized solutions to common business problems. It was also extensible with plain text code when needed.

mont_tag 1y ago

One place where Visual development tools almost always win is in problem domains that are intrinsically visual (think CAD, form designers, etc)

moomoo11 1y ago

Excel is probably the only software I consider “perfect” and that is saying a lot imo.

test6554 1y ago

This is a bit like getting mad that Adam Sandler made another movie. It costs you nothing that stuff other people like exists. Don't waste energy on it.

skeledrew 1y ago

I agree that devs (and everyone else) are fundamentally lazy. I don't agree with the scared. People would rather spend time on things that bring them joy, and that thing which made them excited to work with Company X might be no more, or a whole other thing altogether, 6 months later. But they still need that paycheck, so they do what they can to offset the increasing pain and displeasure so they can continue. The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution. And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.

altairprime 1y ago

This article is missing something important: businesses are adopting these services in order to lower the required skill level of their headcount roles. If they can outsource the work to a worse product that is barely fit for purposes while reducing the pay and tier of the headcount associated with maintaining it, then that’s a total win so long as flexibility and resilience are lower priority than increasing profits by replacing a high-skilled programmer with a low-skilled worker.

junto 1y ago

In every project I’ve seen where someone has evangelized a visual workflow designer (bar none), the overriding argument has been that “power users”, can “manage” the business workflows. In every project the business users have no interest in “managing” business workflows, so the developers that built the tool end up having to use the tool for them, implementing their business use cases. Developers are much more comfortable with code. You cannot easily unit test visual workflow designers. You cannot easily version or put visual workflow designs into source control. Whenever I see one of these projects I run screaming in the opposite direction. Locode in general is an anti pattern. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, aka. Microsoft Access Online I would like to be able to upvote this post 100 times.

dalibenothmen 1y ago
Absolutely agree! I’ve seen the same thing happen. The idea that “power users” will manage workflows sounds great on paper, but in reality, it always falls back on developers. And once things get even slightly complex, I end up writing custom scripts anyway because the visual tools just can’t handle it cleanly. At that point, you’re stuck using a tool that’s harder to debug, test, or version and still coding on the side. Totally with you on this being an anti-pattern in most serious use cases.

BoredPositron 1y ago

You can brute force via visual workflow tools and it will look impressive to your coworkers because of all the noodles. It's performative like all the shit people did in excel in the 90s.

eezing 1y ago

With AI, this is about to get a whole lot worse.