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capybara_2020

Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years?

I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers, and they have been trying for decades. But failed! They built an app that allowed you to drag and drop blocks, and they tried a visual query builder(not sure what the exact name was) for SQL. They added a workflow builder to SharePoint.

They all worked great during the marketing demos. But as soon as you had to execute a slightly complex process/workflow/idea, it broke. And that happens almost on day 2 after deployment. The only success they found in automation was by getting non-devs to learn development using VBA macros for MS Office.

How is the current suite of no-code apps different. How will they solve the problem with non-trivial tasks?

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> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years?

It's a basic error of attribution.

We need complex systems, and we build them typically by text source, which is the most efficient way of coding a system (as we've found over the decades).

Because the source looks arcane to an untrained eye, people attribute the complexity to the form of the code: text source, and not to the nature of the systems being built, which have some natural level of complexity.

Hence we try to alter the source form in some visual "friendly" way and believe we've achieved further simplicity. Demos looks attractive by connecting 3-4 high-level blocks together that make milkshake, or whatever.

In real world projects, using these visual systems end up even more complex and much less flexible than text source. Rinse and repeat.

This is an excellent comment, I love how you phrase it. I've had people (even on HN) get angry at me when I suggest that we do have a wonderful visual/graphical was to write software: text. Text is a graphical representation of ideas. One that, as you point out, has been honed over hundreds of years for expressing ideas, and decades for expressing code.

Text is so amazingly intuitive that don't even think of it as graphical, but it is. As you also point out, the reason it looks complex is because software is complex.

Text also has the best tooling around change management. Every developer I interview these days knows how to use source control, do diffs and code review, use local / staging / production environments and do rollbacks and hotfixes (etc etc). Sometimes the allure of these no code platforms in solving some important problems overlooks that even if they can do that well, they _also_ need to be just as good as change management, and likely the person building said app needs to understand all these concepts well.

I remember similar sentiments among geeks when GUI's became more commonplace compared to command line interfaces like DOS. But the reality is that for the majority of people using a GUI is much easier than a text based interface.

A full-blown general purpose text-based programming language is of course always more powerful, but a task-specific GUI can be much more efficient for the particular tasks they are designed for.

Command-line interface isn't simply text, it's a conversational UI.

People who claimed GUI lost something were right, and that's why what was lost keeps coming back and it's still with us.

Google Search, Siri / Google Assistant, and the prompts in almost any video/graphics/3D-modeling software or other professional packages, not to mention the recent craze in "chat bots", all of those are essentially CLI reborn.

I design and develop a no-code tool [1] for the last 7 years. I see many software developers on HN struggle to understand the point of no-code. I'll try to explain.

First of all, no-code tools are not intended for developers. Although, developers can and do benefit from them by using them occasionally for prototyping and mundane automations. The main beneficiaries of no-code tools are "citizen developers" - people who get paid for something else than software development (e.g. marketing analysts, accountants, lawyers, etc) but who need/want to automate things to be more productive in their main work. For them, no-code is a godsend. It's like not having hands and asking someone else to do something for your with their hands all your life, and then suddenly getting your own pair of hands. No-code is a super-power to them because now they can do things they need but couldn't do earlier. For instance, querying databases without knowing SQL, pulling data from web APIs without having a clue about HTTP, or renaming a thousand of files in a loop. No-code is not about doing everything. No-code is about being able to do something, because previously its target audience could do nothing. Remember that excitement when you wrote your first Hello World program and it worked? This is exactly how "citizen developers" feel about no-code.

Second, no-code is not a replacement for general-purpose computing and never meant to be. There is only a limited set of tasks, that can be efficiently automated using no-code and high-level abstractions - ETL, file/folder manipulations, RPA, certain things from gamedev and ML, and maybe robotics. However, these tasks are very common and no-code saves a lot of time and money for them.

Third, no-code creates a new class of people that can do programming, because no-code is programming. It just uses higher-level abstractions and can be imperative, declarative, or functional. This class of programming is here to stay because it works.

I'll stop here because I can talk about no-code for hours :)

[1] https://easymorph.com

Well said. No code tools can work brilliantly when they are aimed at a specific domain and don't try to be too general.

I can talk about one of the low code/no code product: Power Platform. It is a Microsoft’s low-code/no-code platform that let users create apps, develop workflows, develop chat and desktop bots and also use commoditized AI models. The platform is now in business since 4+ years and I know many Fortune 100 companies who have got 5000+ apps - both for internal org and for business with external partners, subcontractors etc. It is a massive thing. A simple license gets you a storage space in cloud, works with Teams, Office 365, Sharepoint etc and also apps thus developed (all using no code/low code approach) can scale (without rewriting using code) to talk to Microsoft’s business apps aka Dynamics 365 and 400+ other systems (inc Oracle etc)

I feel the view of ‘no code / low code’ is a bit primitive here. It used to be like that but last 3/4 years, the entire thing paradigm has changed fundamentally.

Let me know when you can do proper software engineering, with unit/integration tests and deterministic performance testing/scaling on them.

A previous company forced devs to switch/add a no/low-code tool. We were given 3 to evaluate: dell boomi/mulesoft/some other crap.

Most devs were gone within 6 months of that mandate coming in to effect.

Horrible, immature, limiting tools.

Do you think the A team devs are building these no-code tools after their initial prototype? No, they're being farmed out to design and development by middling product managers and devs - which never ends well.

It always amazes me how so few HN'ers know about the largest no-code platforms out there: Salesforce and Power Platform.

Visual Basic was incredibly successful. From VB3 adding database support until VB6-ish started integrating with .NET, 10s of millions of developers built applications that you've just never heard of.

What killed RAD tools was the web, not them being a failure.

Would the low code equivalent from the era be MS Access? And the webification of that being MS FrontPage for UI w/ MS Access .mdb behind? You also had ColdFusion wizards, Dreamweaver app helpers, etc.

Maybe what killed that push was proliferation of cheap journeymen: everyone’s niece wanted to be a web dev, everyone’s nephew a web designer, so it was easier to have your nephew or niece build your site than research which low code boxed software of the age would let you do it yourself.

The niece went down the path of PHP, Rails, and node.js+Angular/React, the nephew down the path of Dreamweaver, Creative Suite, Sketch, Figma. Plentiful cheap hands you can pick up the phone and boss around, nobody needs low code.

Now the tide has shifted. Nieces, nephews, cousins, anyone with a knack are all doing it, but the demand outstrips this supply.

So the demand needs more workers or more automation. Code camps aren’t keeping up, but boxed software is now web delivery. Advertising puts it under general public noses.

Anyone can find a way to build a thing (there are a thousand drag and drop app/site builders now), and the average small biz owner reading the marketing then dragging and dropping doesn’t have a clue whether that’s limiting or good idea.

So yeah what killed RAD tools was the web, but also kids. Now the kids on the web are building the next gen of RAD. And the circle of life continues. :-)

> until VB6-ish started integrating with .NET

Minor nitpick :)

VB6 never had tooling to integrate with .NET.

Rather, .NET could provide an "interop" layer to allow you to consume components written in VB6, or just COM in general. You can also create COM visible components written in .NET that could be consumed by VB6 or even scripting languages such as VB script. But the tooling for that was delivered through the .NET SDK/VS.

But on your other point, you're right, there are probably a bazillion unknown VB apps out there still chugging along doing their one thing for a specific department or company.

The environment and situation has changed:

(i) higher coding literacy, either from folks already knowing something or companies taking a more active role in providing trading for some minimum set of coding skills.

(ii) more compliance burden and control, i.e. while in the old days people might have been allowed to use Excel macros, some development environment etc., today tools are more likely to be locked down. So a controlled environments allowing people to do limited development and adaptation are of interest.

(iii) Low hanging fruits partially picked. There are tasks that could be automated but where gathering the requirements is too expensive. For example, small tasks done by a few people only - but there are a lot of those. So allowing people to partially automate themselves is a good idea.(and yes, these tasked could well be pretty trivial).

Integrations, and the number of API-as-a-service tools like Twilio available today. The core idea's the same as previous shots at no-code dev, but the number of things you can do, the features you build into a product, just by integrating with another service, is staggering.

The same way things like Twilio/Stripe/AWS speed up standard development also make no-code development more valuable.

> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years?

People (on the customer side) want automation that people who nominally aren't coders can build.

People (on the seller side) want sweet enterprise sales with maximum vendor lock-in.

Nothing, really, has changed... that's been the story forever.

> I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers

Hence, Excel, Access, PowerApps...

Also, really, the low-/no-code capabilities and empower analysts vs. devs to build tools or perform tasks that would otherwise take one-time dev or DBA time is also a selling point around a lot of the SQL Server ecosystem, e.g., SS[R/I/A]S.

> I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers

Yes, and have lots of success and lock-in from doing that.

> But failed!

No, no they didn't.

Oh, I mean sure, their no-/low-code tools require a lot of the same skills to build decent apps that arr required for other software development because coding was never the hard part. But, from MS’s point of view, that's irrelevant to the problem they are solving.

I think what has changed is mostly people’s “literacy” towards coding, automation, APIs (integration), etc.

Where before concepts like a logic branch and a loop were very foreign I think a lot more people know what they mean.

Also the industry has learned that 80% of the uses cases are around CRUD and different ways to enter data and view data.

Not just MS, RAD tools were the big thing about 20 years ago

Total failure,

From reading the comments here, sounds like the no-code, the rebranded RAD, has the exact same problems again.

Back in the day RAD tools created forms with fixed layout, fixed sizes. Everyone used similar computers with similar displays. There were some simple ways to create windows with dynamic size, but those were very primitive and most dialogs were fixed.

Creating fixed UI is extremely easy to understand. You just put a control, snap it to grid for consistent spacings and that's about it. Everyone can do it, very fast with very little time spent on UI.

Modern computers are highly variable in size. Small smartphones, large smartphones, tablets of all sizes, laptops, 5K mac displays.

Smartphones and tablets expect full-width applications. It's not appropriate to design your UI for 320 px fixed width. It'll be too terrible on larger phones. It's expected to have fully stretchable UI at least.

But that leads to very complex to understand creator UI. Xcode, Android Studio, Java Swing. They have powerful layouts, but their GUI to build those layouts are incredibly complex. You might spend lots of time for very simple thing. It's nowhere near good old Delphi, when I could put few buttons around and call it a day.

Of course I'm not arguing that layout managers are not needed. Another feature is internationalization and it was terrible with Delphi, when you had to translate a button but translated text could not fit into its fixed width. What I want to point out is that there's still unfulfilled need for layout manager, which is powerful, yet very easy to use.

May be we need some AI for that.

There are also some highly successful no-code/low-code platforms like Excel which are used for complex business-critical tasks.

I’m interested in what these things do better than Salesforce, which is incredibly powerful Apps for gaps foothold, and allows both code and no code development.

I suspect the answer is that they don’t require you to buy seats for all the users, but wonder if anyone is familiar with both.

> what these things do better than Salesforce

Not being Salesforce ;)

I worked on a bunch of Salesforce stuff for about a year, including building an app. Can't say I relished that time. I think the thing that seems attractive about Bubble is it doesn't carry the other baggage that you get included with Salesforce.

Salesforce's pricing model is quite clearly aimed at large organizations. People still consider it to be primarily a CRM that can be customized to build web apps.

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