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Comment by odshoifsdhfs | Hacker News Reader

I am working on a product in this space.

I think pretty much all the 'no code' apps that are coming out have taken the wrong approach to it. No matter what, they are still 'designed' by programmers with a programming mentality. This will lead to a sort of failure as people will feel limited when using it, and a 'non programmer' mentality looks at this and goes wtf?

For example:

> =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes")

I can understand this, 80% of folks here also, but do your mother or father? Or the small business owner down the street? Why is the word `Tasks` in 3 places? What is the "Yes", and so on and on

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Yeah, man, this looks like a beefed-up version of Excel macros

Anyone who can write working spreadsheet macros could probably just learn to actually program. Maybe they aren't going to be making the next RTX Voice or proving P=NP, but I'll bet they could crank out some CRUD

I did a lot of customer interviews. And I mean a lot.

People that are good at using Excel (as in, not just create a table with data, but know how to use it, do macros, pivots, etc), if the need arrives they just move up the chain to Access/Filemaker. I would say Excel is their gateway drug to coding. Maybe now they will move to Honeycode perhaps (if the UI is ok)

The ones that can't use Excel past putting =A1+A2*0.2 can't use most of the no code tools. But they can use a more visual approach to programming. This is the market I believe will/is exploding as more and more, pretty much everything requires a computer/app, but the customisation for each specific case isn't there. They require a more Lego like approach to 'software' development. For me, that is the NO-CODE definition.

Call me crazy, but with all the high-level language features in most of the commonly used languages of today, combined with the depth of rich IDE tooling for those languages, we already exist in a no-code world.

Yes and no. Maybe you have better examples of programming languages, but even Ruby/Rails, Python, etc have concepts that make sense for programmers that non programmers don't grasp. Think of it this way, if you give a good designer the Rails Book (or another one), he may be able to do something after a few weeks that may match (but very crudely) the app he thought off.

Now give the same designer Sketch/Figma, but allow him to sprinkle some logic in ready made blocks (if/elses, loops, save object, etc) and he will get much closer to what he wanted.

Is the second approach better? Well most programmers will scream at the database model, etc. For the designer, he did in 2-3 days what would take him weeks and get away with something better.

I think a lot of programmers look at their experience and think 'no-code' will never work, but (where my experience comes) 20+ years of doing software development as a consultant, what I found is 80-90% of most software share most of their functionality, and the remaining percent are in many ways doable with just a bit of 'scripting'

With all the customer interviews you've done, what roles and what industries are the ones you believe to have a larger number of these users who are good at Excel, who are ready to move up the chain to Access/Filemaker?

Deploying the CRUD securely is a problem, though. Things like this and AirTable are entirely managed by their developers and your IT department, and Excel sheets can just be dropped into an email. If I write a cool python script, how is the rest of my team supposed to use it if none of us are developers and haven’t done it before, and with IT probably trying to stop me?

Also to point out, since mentioning the security aspect, any file/attachment/etc uploaded to AirTable are 100% open and unsecured as long as you can obtain the URL from any AirTable spreadsheet. They don't have a concept of authentication in regards to any files you've uploaded, regardless of your plan.

There is a very large target audience which is technical enough to write Excel formulas but not enough to build an app. Your mother or father will never need to use this tool as it is, but those people will.

Wait, who are these people? WYSIWYG App builders have existed for decades and Excel still dominates. Maybe you don't agree, but the main reason for this in my opinion is because these app builders are way too complicated and learning them is largely pointless since their use cases are generally super trivial. Why build an app if Excel+Email works?

Further, if these things do start taking off I don't think the people using them will be non technical people, it will just be technical people shifting their job description.

It is like an all in one hammer, the craftsman throws it in the garbage, and the non craftsman has no idea what to do with it.

These app builders have existed for decades, but its the preloaded integrations that make this generation different. Instant connections to a multitude of cloud databases. Type in your credentials, visualize your data. And these integrations might not just be a database api, but come preloaded with schema to contextualize your database.

It's not that they are difficult or something but usually the decision makers,who could make Excel,as a local database,backup system and CRM platform on Annie's PC go,have no concept of what's better or worse or that sending hundreds of Excel files back and forth is not a great idea. There are people out there running thousands people divisions and having no clue that they could probably get rid of 20% of them just if they would have some centralised system.

Why build an app if Excel+Email works?

Of course it does.There are people on YouTube making houses with swimming pools by carving soil with some primitive tools but does that mean it's the best way to go?

Well, having seen enough people who will never ever in their lives be able to understand this: =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes"

And I'm 100% sure that no company would let them anywhere near that kind of stuff,even if it's vanilla drag and drop. Those people are good at some jobs and task but definitely not at this. Anything designed for purely non technical people usually is just a bit crappy: I taught myself programming so I won't need to deal with Salesforce Flow...

I like what you're saying. Would just add that if my mother and father are the audience, I fear your solution would be unfairly docked a couple stars just for existing online and in software form. They would much prefer that any app exist as the result of a 10-minute phone call. ;-)

Care to explain? I didn't fully understand.

You mean they prefer to call someone for 10 minutes and pay them to build the app? Or a recommendation to use an existing app?

I think they mean call a person to have <x> done. Like booking a room or ordering food.

There are much powerful && easier to use no-code/low-code products on the market but sooner or later, you will need to code and work with databases. Even Bubble becomes complex once you move beyond the most basic use cases.

IMO, that example is absolutely not "no code". In fact, I would think it would be very hard to understand by non-coders. If you can train someone to understand that, you could train them to code.

The only saving grace it has is that most of the interface is "no code" so that you can focus your training on smaller pieces... But that's just "low code" at that point, which isn't nearly as marketable.

A requirements-writing assistant would be killer. Maybe something that uses natural language and writes a spec in a formal language under the hood.

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