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Comment by Shiku | Hacker News Reader

Great point. There's certainly much more that goes into building a site like Reddit than what goes into building a clone in two weeks. The purpose of this is to show the potential of what can be done in no-code.

No-code is still in it's very early days, and I think that a lot of its capabilities will improve over time. Also, it's very possible that a lot of the inefficiencies in no-code apps are a result of the builder not the platform (i.e. me in this case). I've been building with Bubble only for a few months, and this is only the second app I've built. I'm sure there are a number of inefficiencies in my workflows, but I'll also improve on that over time as well.

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> No-code is still in it's very early days

This is simply not true. WYSIWYG is no code and has been around since long before people had catchy names for it. Dreamweaver and FrontPage were early examples of it, the benefit they provided was they attempted to let you design by a GUI first, then they'd let you peak the code underneath. Usually, no-code or low-code these days does not come with the source, which makes it especially useless to anyone who wants to do anything meaningful with it.

I would define no code & WYSIWYG as different things. No code includes deeper, server side functionality; whereas WYSIWYG for HTML is simple page editing. Even the Javascript based actions an editor provides are only client side.

Isn’t no code and GUI software builders an idea that has been tried for decades? Wasn’t Adobe dream weaver one of the early tools?

Dream weaver was a WYSIWYG website builder that offered the ability to edit the “raw” HTML. If you want mockups/wireframes/etc., there’s Adobe XD.

Tangent: who names these things? XD? Where did that come from? It looks like a laughing emoticon…

XD stands for eXperience Design but I like the emoticon interpretation.

Performance and the deep level tweaking is exactly what I would worry about with a no-code app (much like with WYSIWYG UI editors you end up with inefficient oversized webpages). Generally having less control over the details results in the details needing to be overly complex generalizations.

Of course, maybe someone will solve that problem. (Or computers will get so powerful efficiency ceases to matter). It also doesn’t change that things like no-code could be great for people less programming focused to prototype ideas, or create scripts to run over data much like people have used excel for ages. It might just remain necessary to eventually pass the implementation onto a non-visual programmer when scaling the solutions up for production.

I didn’t intend to slight your work, so apologies if my comment came across too harsh. My concern is with no-code in general, which I think is a great toolset for some use cases but can quickly become too complex to handle. I’ve seen non-programmers get into all sorts of messes using no code applications as they didn’t want to go through IT (for understandable reasons) and ended up with applications being buggy, inefficient and, in one case, insecurely harvesting & storing credit card numbers. They then turn to IT to fix their mess, which is difficult as being a programmer and knowing a no-code ecosystem are very different skill sets.

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