> code isn't basketball, it's duck tape.
And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...
And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...
I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being written to get around some half-thought, bad UX we professionals foisted on them in the first place? We build restrictive apps and bad workflows that make it harder for them to do their jobs, and then we have the gall to say that they're not professional enough or predisposed enough to a certain kind of thinking to write their own code?
Give those non-programmers some degree of access to a world where computers are creative tools that can be commanded, not just single-purpose devices that do pre-specified things. Because that world is great, and they should have access to it regardless of whether or not they're good at programming. And it's not like the modern software industry is so wildly quality-controlled right now that we're in any position to tell anyone that they're not good enough or thoughtful enough to deserve having more agency over the tools they use.
Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry.
But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways. Some horrible workflow for a small department that functions by manually juggling 3 spreadsheets may not rise to the level of an IT provided solution being created, but with the proper tooling the non-programmers can create a better solution than what currently exists.
There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.