Comment by smetj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smetj | Hacker News Reader

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I have no experience with this particular implementation but I do have experience with some important business process developed in Azure Logic Apps, which is kind of the same in spirit I believe.

From what I have seen, these kind of frameworks facilitates the worst possible combination of factors: A solution designed, created and implemented by non-programmers, not using a programming language ending up in a production environment.

One could argue this is a success in its own but I have only seen these kind of things hit their limits almost immediately after the initial POC and evolve into terrible tech debt. Just learn to program or script already.

That being said, I do not want to disrespect the effort into building this and perhaps there is a place for these kind of solutions I yet have to experience.

Fair enough I'd say :) The concern is understandable, but I honestly think Pipes is different.

The operations Pipes can do are at the same time very generic and very targeted. It's stuff like "Download this url" and "Filter this feed for that word", and it gives you a selection of blocks like extract and insert with which you can manipulate the data in the pipe (or the feed, depending how you look at it) a bit more freely. There is surprisingly a lot that can be done with that, especially with a replace block that supports regex, but it's not a deep abstraction layer above things that are not mappable to rather small operations.

Thank you for highlighting that, much appreciated.

If the PoC can be built by those with strong domain knowledge, providing the basis for a detailed spec, that seems like a win to me.

That would be a win, but then the hideous code becomes the spec, and it becomes a project ten times the size to reverse engineer the "spec" into an actual spec.

But if you let them do it in Excel, it would be 10 times worse again.

Yes, I agree with that.

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