As tools evolve programmers get exponentially more productive, but they will still be coding. They might be coding different things though because what we do today can now be done by a tool
People point UI work will be replaced, I actually highly doubt that, unless there is an standardisation of UI-toolkit like we used to have in the windows 98 days (which seems incredibly unlikely). Remember Delphi and Visual Basic? Sure there was code in there, but very rarely did you need actually need to write UI-code like animating a text box around, most of it was business logic code
If anything the UI landscape is changing to be more custom for each app instead of consolidating. I expect UI coding will look very different in the future though, more focused on unique user interactions and animations instead of API calls and Form glue code
And then, after 2 or 3 years, the hype is gone, because it turns out that
a) Complexity can be hidden and displaced but not eliminated
b) Vendor Lock-In issues
c) Interoperability issues with existing tools, platforms and systems (ever tried to version-control a nolo-code project?)
and last but certainly not least
d) As projects get bigger and requirements pile up, at some point there is a requirement not satisfied by the platform; then the dance to somehow interface it with "some code" starts, then the next requirement comes along, and the next, and at some point somehow aska the question "Wouldn't it be simpler to rewrite this in XYZ" and at that point the cycle usually ends.
That doesn't mean that these things do not add value. The hype is usually gone after each cycle, but useful things that help a lot of people making things they would't have otherwise made remain.
But it doesn't replace coding.
And developers haven't been replaced, and it is unlikely that they will be. But the role has already changed. A bigger part of being a developer is to understand business requirement and talking to customers (internal and external), while previously you could rely on your precious technical skills to be irreplaceable.
Finally, for many people No Code seems to mean "graphical code". That is certainly nothing new and is great for some things, like developing interfaces and I have seen some reasonably successful ones for developing database schemas. But for expressing flow and logic, text still rules supreme (for a number of reasons).
In that world, most devs work primarily in the no-code portion of that platform, maybe with some basic coding skills. That group does the majority of app dev work. But there is a smaller percentage of people who do write code, and who do the work that goes beyond what the no-code features can do.
So most other platforms will likely match - a wide swath of people, functions, and apps are no-code, and you absolutely can succeed both doing no-code work for your job, with most businesses not needing more than that. But there will always be another layer underneath the non-code to let businesses who need more to have coders who add more features.
Would a hospital booking thousands of appointments in a given day be able to get by with the same no-code solution? No, but there's only going to be so many of them.
That being said, I also know a doctor who created an MVP of a specialist look-up service using FileMaker(!).
it more like no-code and low-code makes smaller projects more viable, even small projects within big companies
Think of it like Game Engine, where you could make games with editors, and then you add some code, all the way to some AA Games ( May be not AAA ).
May be a better example for the Web would be something like Yahoo Pipes.
In the end we still had to ditch them, as the low-code cowboy coding didn't mesh well with the need for multiple environments and running tests in CI and backups, etc..
[0]: https://bubble.io/
And I haven't see anything like that ( yet ). Because from a business perspective, you want your client to be locked into SaaS, but from a user perspective, they want to have the option to full control.
But I will take a look at bubble, seems interesting judging by the showcase.
That said, for the chiropractor who needs a website to list his phone number, address, and services, I think a future where he doesn't need to hire a web designer and potentially get scammed (I've seen this a number of times) is a bright one, and I do think we're headed towards a future where the tools are good enough to make very basic front end dev work for situations like this obsolete.
That feels like desktop publishing more than coding already.
I call it the "army of consultants problem", sure you can use a low/no-code tool, but if your problem is complex or big enough you will eventually need an army of consultants specialised in said tool to maintain your solution and you will be limited by what the tool can do. Eventually you get to that point it becomes more expensive than just building custom, but by then your company is too invested in the tool and only a band-aid ripping can fix it. Most often than not ripping it out would kill the company/product if it happens too late. Thing is, the tools give the impression they are cheaper because you get a lot "out of the box", while a custom-built tool takes a long time to do anything useful
Reminds me an article I read once, it was about why My Space failed, it propositioned that the main reason was that they were using Dreamweaver and their product was so big and complex that the devs could no longer handle the complexity to add new features or fix performance problems. And the company as an organisation could not find enough dreamweaver devs because they needed an army of them
One of the main triggers for this is cloud infrastructure is so much better and cheaper today that a single developer can orchestrate a really complex system of services and servers in a few hours if he knows what he is doing. So the industry as a whole is shifting from "army of low skill specialised devs" to "low amount of highly skilled generalist devs". You can see it in the job openings, nobody wants to hire low-level anymore, or if they do it is to support legacy systems
It reminds me of a guy I interviewed who worked at a fashion brand as a software engineer, his job was to build a custom system to automate fitting photos of clothes to photos of people to put in the e-commerce site. Previously they did it manually with photoshop, but they needed an army of photoshop guys to do it. His solution was custom to the needs of the company (ie only the poses they needed), a generic SaaS solution, if it existed, would have probably been too complex to use or maintain
In general the Joel rule applies: "If it is core to your business, you want to do it in-house". Although I can think of a few exceptions, like payment/subscription flows for e-commerce. But heck I bet Amazon has their own custom payment/subscription systems for each market
I recently started using a no-code tool called Glide[0], because it emphasized that the starting point could be as simple as a Google Sheet. That data is pulled into the app's visual builder interface, so you can start playing around with filters and conditional logic to show/hide information.
Then you can set up user logins, Stripe integration and basic CRUD functionality with read/writes happening on the Gsheet. You can string together actions with Zapier and create calculated columns like you would on an Excel pivot table.
Ultimately, I can see myself creating a small community app using this tool, but not something that has hundreds of thousands of users, as then we get into tricky issues of vendor lock-in.
So IMO, the use case for something like this is for rapid prototyping and and an MVP. You wouldn't want your entire business hosted on someone else's platform, so as you get user feedback on the MVP, you should be talking to a dev about how to move off-platform: hosting, deployment, using a proper DB, security reviews ---- all the ugly stuff the no-code tool abstracted away.
I remember when automatic cars came about - people who were used to manual shift resisted it, but now it’s almost silly to push back on automatic.
Another good example is house printing / prefabs - it’s just a matter of adoption but builders provide the resistance because of money they’ll loose.
Maybe no-code it's more like autonomous driving: "big, if true" but not quite there yet?
No-code only means that the code is somewhere else and it has been nicely packaged for easy reuse. The moment you can't build it with lego, you can't do it with no-code. :)
I think there is huge potential for improved spreadsheets, either with generic things such as greater scalability/ability to schedule reports or with inbuilt capability for common tasks for specific industries.
Take data input: You want your front line workers to record every time they do thing X. They could go into a spreadsheet and increment the count by 1 (or add a new entry in the row each time) or they could pull out their phone and open an app and press +1X, with the option of -1X if they make a mistake.
Which one is going to be better quality data?
For me, the key to a no-code solution is that it provides an escape hatch into code when necessary. If I have that, the no-code stuff is actually really nice.
We're already seeing similar parallel in Finance with End User Computing[0] where non-developers (traders, etc) are using tools like Python, Jupyter, etc as part of their jobs.
I don't ever see it replacing developers though. Maybe if your entire job is workflow automation, sure, but developers will focus on solutions that are difficult to do with Low/No Code tools.
What an odd question to ask! Who do you think is going to code / maintain those "no-code" tools then? If for nothing else, this is one reason why you'll never obsolete developers.
But actually, if you think about it, the best you can do is that you raise the level of abstraction - that doesn't mean the new level will not need developers.
Of course, for certain common "boring" software will be no-code, which I'm actually quite happy about. Who would want to code the N+1st CRUD app over and over again?...
The key is to know when it’s time to outgrow the no-code version and start a real custom implementation. Not all businesses will get there, but the developers need to know when it’s time to switch over.
Fortunately, replicating a no-code site as a custom solution is actually quite easy in most cases because the no-code building blocks have a lot of easy to use code library equivalents.
In my opinion there is a market for it but they should not fall into the trap of trying to be generic (like bubble for example), when they do, they are quite hard to use that you might as well learn coding.
But for specific use cases building a simple and custom CRM, showing structured data, prototyping etc it's good.
Good development tools can be used to accelerate development when they help you leverage your knowledge of the system and technology. What I haven't seen them do is replace a deep understanding of how things work that's necessary to build scalable and performant software.
Of course the web is/will be changing. The only interesting aspect of the web is that it expends so much effort changing it's fashion rather than it's form that this question even has to be asked.
Salesforce and Wordpress are both "no-code" platforms that people have built businesses on. Fortunately they include the ability to write and edit code so you can go past the limitations of its off-the-shelf plugin libraries.
in an age where everything will look almost the same there will be demand to be authentic.
If I'm building a system with an intended life span of >=5 years I would avoid a no code platform.
If I'm doing a one off proof of concept test app, it's on the table.
- Forrester, said that low-code can make software development 10-times faster than the method of writing complex code.
- On the onther hand, According to Gartner’s report, by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.
Of course, these are only predictions, we'll see if they come true...
However, in my opinion, No-Code / Low-Code tools can become invaluable support for developers, especially by eliminating simple, repetitive activities.
Thanks to them, those who know how to code will be even more valuable. Developers will focus on developing tools that require more complex skills, not provided by no-code tools