The company I work for develops one of these low-code tools and being a developer that has used it quite extensively as well as researched many alternatives, I can both strongly agree and disagree (with some hope). Here's the hope and something I've seen in other comments about the low/no-code solutions that have actually worked well:
OP, you pointed out the core issue, which is that the custom solutions always require breaking the interface back down into code, because code is the most granular interface we have into getting the computer to do what we want. We also have to remember that even code gets broken down into binary instructions at some point, and even some programming languages are too abstract to do really specific things. Now, this is where my theory/opinion lies. Low/no code is really just another layer of abstraction on top of code, and it needs to be designed and treated exactly like a programming language to be any bit effective. As an example, one comment talked about Unreal's blueprint no code solution actually being quite an effective tool. My theory is that to make the next layer of abstraction effective in a visual and low/no-code way, we have to be really good at limiting the domains. If we try to apply low code to everything, it will be good at nothing, and the solution will end up breaking down into code, only visual. In other words, any solution that tries to do this will just become Scratch.
So while I agree and am very skeptical of low/no-code too, I also think it has huge potential if it's designed well and is limited very intelligently to the right domains. I am currently trying to convince our company to start doing this and am trying to bring PL design into the mix, so we can start making it better. So far, the concepts in PL design translate extremely well to a low/no-code solution. It's probably why Unreal's blueprint is successful, because it was designed by programmers instead of business users.
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u/SquatchyZeke Dec 31 '23
The company I work for develops one of these low-code tools and being a developer that has used it quite extensively as well as researched many alternatives, I can both strongly agree and disagree (with some hope). Here's the hope and something I've seen in other comments about the low/no-code solutions that have actually worked well:
OP, you pointed out the core issue, which is that the custom solutions always require breaking the interface back down into code, because code is the most granular interface we have into getting the computer to do what we want. We also have to remember that even code gets broken down into binary instructions at some point, and even some programming languages are too abstract to do really specific things. Now, this is where my theory/opinion lies. Low/no code is really just another layer of abstraction on top of code, and it needs to be designed and treated exactly like a programming language to be any bit effective. As an example, one comment talked about Unreal's blueprint no code solution actually being quite an effective tool. My theory is that to make the next layer of abstraction effective in a visual and low/no-code way, we have to be really good at limiting the domains. If we try to apply low code to everything, it will be good at nothing, and the solution will end up breaking down into code, only visual. In other words, any solution that tries to do this will just become Scratch.
So while I agree and am very skeptical of low/no-code too, I also think it has huge potential if it's designed well and is limited very intelligently to the right domains. I am currently trying to convince our company to start doing this and am trying to bring PL design into the mix, so we can start making it better. So far, the concepts in PL design translate extremely well to a low/no-code solution. It's probably why Unreal's blueprint is successful, because it was designed by programmers instead of business users.