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Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

> In general we have started to figure out how to make the DNA of software systems resilient against the changing tides of time. No-code seems to reject a lot of those learnings, for better or worse.

When I was a kid we had Microsoft front page, a no-code solution that allowed you to create a web page. A few years into college my brother-in-law started making money writing web pages in plain CSS and HTML and a little jQuery. I asked him why he could make money when I could make the web page in front page. he said it was much as easier to change the web page over time when it was written in code than changing the auto-generated garbage HTML that front page produced. No code, then, stood up poorly over time back then and I doubt it will today except as a way to make standard parts out of modular pieces of software, sort of like Unix did back in the '80s with its modular command line tools.

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> it was much as easier to change the web page over time when it was written in code than changing the auto-generated garbage HTML that front page produced. No code stood up poorly over time back then and I doubt it will today

You're in for a rude awakening then!

Webflow (the modern equivalent of Frontpage/dreamweaver) produces portable, semantic HTML and sane CSS. Like half of all YC companies are using it to build their marketing sites now.

I've found it's much faster to completely redesign your site over time with Webflow than with some custom built static site. In fact, I'd say things have flipped. I think whatever esoteric Node Package Mess, shit hot CSS framework and clunky headless CMS you're using today will be the thing that ages poorly over time.

Your response almost proves my point. All those YC companies are super young, and are incentived to go into technical debt in the interest of first becoming profitable. They do all sorts of things the industry has decided are bad ideas in general, in the important (but short lived) interest of speed. They are in the experimentation phase, trying to figure out what will work long term while also not being held back by history with a working product.

Matlab SimuLink is a no code solution that works well. It does so because its users, mostly academics, fit a similar profile to YC startups: both are in the business of making stuff that doesn't need to last long/"writing throwaway code". In both cases, experimentation is important. After all, the YC startups don't know what is profitable yet.

Once profitable, they will want to make much more minor changes. After all, why change something that makes money?

It is this field of fine grained changes where code thrives.

I'll be convinced of no code when banks start using it.

I don't know whether that has changed, but in an old startup I worked at(20 years ago) a tool similar to simulink was used to simulate a wireless chip design over it's development life, a few years.

And in simulation you try/change things often.

It seems to work well.

There, change happen over the many system parameters, small blocks(some written in code), or maybe adding a new block(but those systems are dataflow like, and without that many unique blocks, so it's the right abstraction)

You're probably right that the code Webflow produces is decent for maintainability, but the Webflow website (made in Webflow) does not inspire confidence. At 100% zoom on Firefox/MacOS, content does not actually fit the entire width of the page. Even the headers don't stretch from edge to edge, leaving white bars on the side of most pages. Maybe this is what they intended, but it makes it look like the CSS is broken.

it's intended

> Webflow (the modern equivalent of Frontpage/dreamweaver) produces portable, semantic HTML and sane CSS.

That’s assuming you already know how to use HTML and CSS. The tool does not help you learn that. I worked on a project in Webflow with talented designers who didn't know diddly squat about HTML and CSS, and it was a mess. I agree that it’s amazing that the tool allowed them to do anything at all, but the output was a big ball of tech debt.

No code isn't going to fix bad project management and organization skills.

I'd say 90% of the companies I've worked at who built their sites "from scratch" also had complex messes of duplicate/unused CSS styles and non-semantic HTML elements.

All this built in by so-called "professional" front-end developers!

That’s not really the problem we ran into. It was more a problem of layouts that broke completely as things were resized. I.e. they looked good with specific content and at specific sizes, but broke as soon as the text was edited or the page was resized.

Isn't Front Page written in code ? Seems like we are just moving code around between common tooling and tooling we generate ourselves? What is "no code" really about? I'm genuinely asking.

Yes, yes, and needing to generate less yourself to get things done. That's the pitch at least.

From what I understand, "No code" input is almost fully declarative. Examples are Lotus 123, Oracle forms, Excel without macros. There are no loops, no dictionaries, classes are simple objects mapped to a database table. Functions are inbuilt and most you can do is to compose them. The premise of "No code" is that there will come a time where people will simply declare and compose what exists instead of creating some new code. Take from that what you will.

The intuition that declarative programming fits the human brain much better is correct, but I'd hesitate to call this "no code". You're just moving towards a more mathematical code formalism.

> From what I understand, "No code" input is almost fully declarative.

So is pure functional programming, as well as idealized logic programming (actual Prolog falls short of this in important cases), and some forms of relational programming.

> There are no loops

Often there are via recursive/circular references, for which the platform often has bailout logic to prevent infinite loops.

> no dictionaries,

How is an Excel table different from a dictionary?

> How is an Excel table different from a dictionary?

Dictionary is an indexed key-value store, tables are not?

"No code" means the humans is liberated from creating and maintaining code by hand, because there is now a machine doing it. More specifically it means to generate highly abstracted interfaces for common tasks and hiding all the boilerplate and problems from the humans.

Basically it's "decrading" a developer to be a normal user who is just using some software. Which has the benefit that now every non-developer can do the same work as the developer, and they both have the same output and qualification (theoretically).

Thinking about, the endgoal of this is similar to a full self-driving car. You just name the target and the software drives you there.

Wordpress seems to be relatively adaptable. And it's very sucsessful, in the field of internet marketing, a very dynamic field.

Especially if you look at it as a low-code solution(instead of no-code): most changes can be done using plugins and visual builders, while some require writing a new plugin.

We both agree that Ma and Pa's and startups alike are well served by WordPress. However, this example also reveals that no/low code is best used when starting out or staying small.

I've heard soooo many horror stories around when businesses start to pick up and they have to take this frankenstein of a WordPress site, with custom code atop poorly supported plugins, and must either support or rewrite it.

I think anyone knowledgeable using Wordpress realizes quickly that a rewrite will be part of the plan once the MVP is proved, unless you're literally just making a blog or some very simple site.

Maybe we should distinguish between "no code" and "no knowledge."

Even Excel can excel (!) at, say, a small statistical problem, but scale it and you want something dedicated.

> sort of like Linux did back in the '80s with its modular command line tools.

I believe you mean Unix, as Linux didn't exist in the 80s.

Right! Editing now.

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