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Name one successful no-code solution. Not snark. I'm serious. Give me examples. In my experience, these no-code tools either die being too simple or live long e

by ngruhn 1y ago

Name one successful no-code solution. Not snark. I'm serious. Give me examples. In my experience, these no-code tools either die being too simple or live long enough to be patched into fully fledged visual programming languages. At which point the promised simplicity is gone. Idk, maybe with AI it's different.

mjr00 1y ago
Really depends on the scope of the solution; a lot of web development has gone no-code through the use of frameworks and platforms like Wix, Unbounce, Squarespace, Shopify, Gumroad, etc. Like it's crazy to think, but 15 years ago if you were a person with a single widget you wanted to sell over the internet (even a digital widget with no shipping logistics!) it was a big hassle that involved a lot of programming and hooking up various APIs. Now you can get a full e-commerce site with analytics and payments integrated fairly easily with basically no technical knowledge. The counter-argument is that these tools are too narrowly scoped, but I think that's exactly what made them successful; their "no-code" tools provided a solution for a common problem. Ultimately I agree with what you're getting at. There's never been a successful no-code, or even low-code, replacement for general purpose programming, and there never will be.
- ngruhn 1y ago
  Fair enough. Those website builders have their place. I'm rather thinking of something like NodeRed where you specify control flow. But with boxes and arrows instead of code. Which is also what this Google product seems to do.
blast 1y ago
Replit
holografix 1y ago
Unreal Engine’s Blueprints
shmoogy 1y ago
Node Red, N8N, and Zapier I think are the biggest ones. I think the cool idea of AI implemented no code is, in theory, you can add a new node - tell the AI what to do, and it can build custom logic to do whatever it is that you want with the input. Thats probably verging on too high of a complexity for end users, but if you can obfuscate the black box and have it work well enough, it can definitely be big.
- LudwigNagasena 1y ago
  Visual graph languages are in some ways even superior to code because it’s really hard to express a state machine in an easily readable fashion with code.
jasonjmcghee 1y ago
Substance Designer / Painter, Blender Nodes, TouchDesigner, DaVinci Resolve Fusion, etc. That whole space is full of node-based tools that people build careers on.

by ngruhn 1y ago

mjr00 1y ago

Really depends on the scope of the solution; a lot of web development has gone no-code through the use of frameworks and platforms like Wix, Unbounce, Squarespace, Shopify, Gumroad, etc. Like it's crazy to think, but 15 years ago if you were a person with a single widget you wanted to sell over the internet (even a digital widget with no shipping logistics!) it was a big hassle that involved a lot of programming and hooking up various APIs. Now you can get a full e-commerce site with analytics and payments integrated fairly easily with basically no technical knowledge. The counter-argument is that these tools are too narrowly scoped, but I think that's exactly what made them successful; their "no-code" tools provided a solution for a common problem. Ultimately I agree with what you're getting at. There's never been a successful no-code, or even low-code, replacement for general purpose programming, and there never will be.

ngruhn 1y ago
Fair enough. Those website builders have their place. I'm rather thinking of something like NodeRed where you specify control flow. But with boxes and arrows instead of code. Which is also what this Google product seems to do.

blast 1y ago

Replit

holografix 1y ago

Unreal Engine’s Blueprints

shmoogy 1y ago

Node Red, N8N, and Zapier I think are the biggest ones. I think the cool idea of AI implemented no code is, in theory, you can add a new node - tell the AI what to do, and it can build custom logic to do whatever it is that you want with the input. Thats probably verging on too high of a complexity for end users, but if you can obfuscate the black box and have it work well enough, it can definitely be big.

LudwigNagasena 1y ago
Visual graph languages are in some ways even superior to code because it’s really hard to express a state machine in an easily readable fashion with code.

jasonjmcghee 1y ago

Substance Designer / Painter, Blender Nodes, TouchDesigner, DaVinci Resolve Fusion, etc. That whole space is full of node-based tools that people build careers on.