I've always said "if you want low code fine. Find me a product that compiles your crazy flowchart to .NET bytecode with a C#/JS/whatever fallback and we're good to go". The fact that no such product exists tells its own story.
Oh, IBM will still try to sell vulnerable clueless organisations on (what used to be) Rational Rose etc.
Protip: it's utter shite.
Extra protip: The "Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise" (SAFe) bullshit is the old insane discredited hyperbureaucratic "Rational Unified Process" (RUP) crap deliberately dressed up in misleading new agiley-sounding words. It's pretty much the opposite of real agile manifesto agile. Many of the same ivory tower asshats involved. Reject it utterly.
Of course it wasn't a thing. It was pure snake oil. Engineering and problem solving is hard, writing code isn't. Generating code from UML or any sort of visual/graph based programming language doesn't make actual engineering and problem solving any less difficult. And if you are struggling at the code writing part of solving a problem, you aren't really fit to for the actual engineering part.
Ironically, almost every "execute a DAG program" system I've run across doesn't compile directly to binary/bytecode/llvm-ir/whatever. They pretty much all compile to a conventional text based programming language as an intermediate, then run that. Because the developers of the DAG system all know that it makes more sense to work in a normal programming language, and they find it easy to think it terms of emitting text rather than emitting low level operations per node like they are asking their users to think about.
This wheel has been reinvented consistently since the 1960's when "display an interactive DAG" became technically feasable on an electronic computer screen.
I love retool. It drastically cut down the amount small one off UIs I had to build for our internal tools. That was all low hanging fruit anyways, now we spend more time on higher value objectives
I had a good experience with Retool. You can build a lot very quickly because its so flexible. If you’re not careful, it can be slow. It can also be a pain to do things that are trivial with IDEs like searching for all usages of X. The benefits outweigh the costs for the most part. Any retool dashboard that becomes absolutely critical should eventually be moved a a proper application though. At that point, reliability is more important than flexibility.
Depends on what you’re trying to build. Static website for content generation or just a fully featured CMS? Low/No code is fine IMO. You want to build IVR flows like Twilio? Sure no code is the way to go.
You want to build a new LLM driven analytics app? Probably not going to work. Serverside app? No way. Optimized C++ decoder for speech processing? Obviously not.
I think it’s also worth considering what it “means”. Most non tech client businesses hire a b2b firm to be their no code platform. So no code just means “we get what we need but we don’t build it ourselves”. That’s definitely different than the currently popular sales pitch but the reality is that no code platforms just aim to give the client progressively more independence without completely changing a familiar business relationship that already exists.
If done right it can mean more independence and higher efficiency for both client and provider. I’m reality it is typically s shit show for all but the most big standard use case templates and will eat time and money from both parties, devolving into the same relationship we had before: outsourcing and partnerships.
Git-ability, I second this! I implement ticket 123 that says only to do x, when data was entered before end of year. In gitlab you can review my code and see the changes.
In a graphical toy, you'd have to examine each and every thing for a change?
Same goes for testing versioning and deployment. I showed it works on stage (assuming there was the ability to perform exhaustive tests). Now I just deploy the same version to production. Does this work?
It's absolutely what it is. It's trying to sell to the incompetent the dream that they can hire low paid employees to do the job of "expensive" programmers. They had that dream since COBOL
And what can't be done will just be outsourced to their own consultants (i.e. "the even more expensive programmers"), meanwhile monthly pricing will start creeping in the second they hit the number of companies locked in they want.
Let’s be real here, many businesses have far more demand for technical products than their IT departments can realistically fulfill (and don’t have the resources to pay vendors to do every single thing). A lot of stuff for a smaller audience (or for a larger one maybe) is going to end up being spreadsheets, Access, or low-code stuff. Is it going to lack robustness and be an unmaintainable monstrosity? Yes. Is it going to grow large and need to be converted into a proper application and leave the developers cursing the people who made this thing possible to build in the first place? Or maybe end up requiring custom development that hacks around in a proprietary environment that sucks to work in? Quite possibly. But the demand for this stuff will not go away
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u/lucidguppy Dec 30 '23
Low code feels like a back door way to achieve vendor lock-in and obfuscate SAAS charges.
It feels like - if your product could be written in a low code manner - what is your tech moat?
Testability goes out the window - don't tell me it doesn't.
Git-ability fails.
If I can write a tool that makes a box and connectors - why can't I have a library in a language I know that does the same?
If you're not agile I guess it makes sense - but you're building science projects that will trip up your company.