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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

You are missing a huge caveat of those tools. They tend to have limits in functionality.

It isn't uncommon that you prototype with a tool and it is super fast but before you can launch for real you need to rewrite everything.

At that point it is difficult to know if the prototype was valuable. Certainly quickly visualizing is good but a prototype tool that is non functional is even faster to use.

Having a tool that allows easy drag and drop without any friction on the generated code (including difficulty of using that code) while also having all the powers of HTML would be really cool.

Such a tool wouldn't be a beginner tool but any that fail this and can't really go all the way to final product gets discarded as "I am going to have to rewrite anyway".

Less of a "I am too good for that" more a "not a useful abstractions level" when considered holistically.

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That's a good rationalization for doing everything manually, but I don't believe it really holds up. I think it comes down to some social psychological effects that as I said are subconscious. So people don't realize it's effecting their decision making.

When they decide not to use those tools they will use rationales like you said rather than admitting that they felt peer pressure.

Some people want to be good software developers, not just good website builders.

If you want to use low code website builders, feel free. If that suits your work style and the projects you're building, great.

But you will never develop the skills you need to actually build software. A person who spends their life using website builders instead of writing software will never be able to build their own website builder, for example.

Some of us actually like to have the skills to build the tools ourselves.

If you want to call that peer pressure, then sure. It's peer pressure to elevate your own experience and attain mastery, instead of settling for only ever using tools that other people built for you.

You have perfectly illustrated the peer pressure I am talking about.

By the way, I have been programming for 38 years on many platforms and have built my own drag and drop UI editors and frameworks. I don't use these types of tools today because they are not popular and because of psychological factors as I said. But I still think that it would be more logical if programmers used them more often. And the times that I used them in the past they did increase my productivity.

The types of tools I am talking about often require editing code to customize functionality. They are not no-code tools.

If you hire an architect to design a house, then make some adjustments to the blueprint before it gets built, it doesn't make you an architect. In fact if you give your adjusted design to builders and have it made without consulting an architect first, you have a good chance of unknowingly violating some building code somewhere.

Similarly if you use a code generating tool written by a software engineer and then adjust the code output, it doesn't make you a software engineer.

Yes, software engineers can use those tools, but they're limiting their growth as engineers if they rely too heavily on those tools.

If that's peer pressure, then I am unapologetic about it. I'm not hiring people who can't build their own code to work as software engineers.

Disagree, it's a very conscious choice from having been burned repeatedly by being asked to do something leftfield.

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