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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really understand what “no code” is.

Drag and drop plus lots of options in dialog boxes, looks like.

It's been done before. Viamall, (later Yahoo Store) the first online shopping cart system, was very much like that. Totally hosted, updated through the web, pay by the month. When Yahoo bought them, they demanded a cut of revenue, too. Those seem to be the key components of this concept.

Other ancestors include Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, and Hypercard, but those were not hosted by the company behind the system, so they didn't have the lock-in and profit potential of hosted systems.

It's a reaction to the mess the HTML/CSS/Javascript crowd has made of web design. The web was supposed to be WYSIWYG, and that got broken.

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> The web was supposed to be WYSIWYG, and that got broken.

The web was never supposed to be WYSIWYG; this rather is/was a marketing claim by vendors of visual tools for generating websites.

What is true is that it was supposed to be very easy to generate websites in HTML.

Actually, the earliest browsers pre-CSS weren't just viewers but had also editing with primitive styling, though it's difficult to imagine in today's CSS-heavy web. Personally, I think adding a complete new item-value syntax and value space on top of HTML/SGML (which already has attributes for exactly this purpose) was completely uncalled for, and to this date we're hearing about the structure/presentation dichotomy which just never made sense as a justification for adding additional syntax.

Historical note: Viaweb was the baby of our host Paul Graham and his cofounders.

Historical note: Viaweb was written in lisp, so most of the users had a hard time customizing it (I heard of one book on modifying Viaweb, but have never actually seen it.)

Yahoo eventually re-wrote it in another language.

Whereas if they wrote it in C++, the average store owner Joe would have a walk in the park with it?

Depending on how heavily metaprogramming is relied on, relatively so

You are mixing up two layers. Viaweb was written in Common Lisp, but the end users used RMTL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTML).

Whether you implement RTML in Python, Unlambda, Common Lisp or Rust doesn't make a difference to the user.

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