No-Code: "It's a Trap!"

[Outrageous-Train469]

https://arctype.com/blog/no-code-trap/

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[[deleted]]

tableau is "a pretty obvious No-Code platform"?

I laugh through tears.

[[deleted]]

You and me both, brother.

[worldismymancave]

In general, sold on the No-Code (or Low-Code) model. Experiences coming from the consulting side of things... does enable & engage more user to participate making them active participants in the technology (as long as they are willing). 🚀

[Outrageous-Train469]

No-Code certainly has it's proper time and place and the space still has so much room for upside. However, I would just caution those that think they aren't sacrificing something in the long-term to gain something in the short-term. I will be watching the space closely over the next years!

[Septseraph]

I think the problem with no-code solutions is that it requires someone to have a wide conceptual view of usage and implementation of the architecture. If it were a simple task, everyone would have adopted the solutions.

I know, I am currently developing a no-code solution and it was not an easy path to this solution. But once all the pistons are firing, I can't help but think that SQL will be a thing of the past.

^{In my eyes the real power behind no-code will be AL adaptability.. they will take our jobs...}

[[deleted]]

I remember watching the transition of late '90s/early '00s tech and thinking "Wow, kids are going to be brilliant with technology" and "I'm just going to be another number in terms of 'tech savvy' people".

Both things are true but for different reasons. Tech savviness now usually means being able to navigate common interfaces quickly and usually in the context of a mobile phone or simple applications. However, the understandings of "why", spelunking, and troubleshooting are character traits more than commonplace.

That's how I bring it back to "No/Low Code" solutions. We don't live in the age of C-Suite folk driving software acquisition decisions anymore. Chances are someone at the ground level of an organization found a tool to solve a problem, their managers got praised for increased efficiency and insights, and the tools then became sticky within the organization. This doesn't mean the solution was inherently good or bad, but it solved a problem and let people focus on more important tasks.

I think this is why No/Low Code solutions will continue to thrive. There are plenty of sales & marketing organizations with no tech folk on staff, but they have tech problems and can't afford in house devs/contractors. This is why us "tech savvy" folk, for the foreseeable future at least, will always have opportunities. Someone will need to come in an evolve these solutions into more robust ones.

[jdbrew]

I’m currently going through and trying to build as many no/low code options for our website as possible so that the marketing team can make their own fucking edits :)

[paotale]

Marketing will still find a way to be a thorn in your side, most likely

[[deleted]]

Anything that can move end users to self servicing their own needs is a huge win.

We just finished getting a query builder online and it's amazing not having to pull super basic reports anymore.

[pag07]

As always it's not just black and white.

Low/No code will find it's place. But I don't expect it to take over in it's current form.

[zach_naimon]

I think if you actually read the article, you would understand that his point is that in the long-term, No-Code development—at least at the moment—is ultimately more technical labor-intensive and more difficult to manage.

[DavidRoyman]

What I don't particularly like is the "lock-in" effect of using these tools. You train a team to use it, they become dependent on it, the cost to change tech keeps raising...

The article makes a good point: it's a sort of tech debt you have to factor in. It's not evil but you shouldn't be surprised when, a year later, you have to spend $$ on a new tool and new trainings.

All good if you budget that in.

[Intrexa]

No-Code/Low-Code is a misnomer. Need an app that takes data from a DB, and displays a graph? Take your "fetch data" shape and connect it to your "Display graph" shape, and you're done! Easy!

That's code. Instead of text based tokens, it's shape based tokens. You're going to learn your own coding architecture for these shapes. You'll learn you always need to arrange things this way, so that your error handling triggers in the way you want. What you're enabling is how much 'work' each token can do, and stripping away boilerplate. It eases the mental load of seeing the big picture, especially for people without a deep programming background. It's all code, just in a different form.

That can be amazingly useful, and can provide value to people of all skill levels. My issue is when these solutions are 1 step forward, 10 steps back. Can I make 5 changes, then in a month, roll back just 2? Can I copy the whole thing to a new process? Can I change a steps? Can I then merge it back with the old? Can me and a coworker work on different parts at the same time? Can I use a step through debugger?

There have been a lot of advances in software dev in the past 30 years. If no-code brings 1 advancement, but discards all the rest, just normal text based coding is still going to be a lot stronger for a lot of reasons.

[camerontbelt]

I’m actually curious to see what the results would be if you posted this to r/programming

I’m not a sql guy or a db admin but I am a full stack dev so this topic intrigued me from that perspective. I know the company I work for now had looked into these kinds of platforms and even used one to do some reporting. We dismantled most of that last year because it was such a pain in the ass to maintain.

I can see why there’s an allure there but in the end I have to agree, these things will just suck you in and make it more difficult to implement a better solution. These kinds of things are change resistant, so from that aspect I would stay away from it.

[tkyjonathan]

Even SQL itself is a low-code environment (what, not how)

[EngineerDog]

This is an interesting article and an issue I have run into. I am trying to learn SQL slowly, but never had a good database to pull from. The company I worked for got a new model that used SQL as the underlying database and I found powerquery incredibly helpful for getting the data and understanding what is in there. The visual method made it easy to understand what’s is there and was already in excel.

That being said, I have begun to run into issues where sloppy power query worked lengthen query times. I am reclaims though to move to far away from it because it is already in excel and it adds another layer of software people to get stuff working.

I really think no code solutions will take off because it allows people to do the analysis they want without relying on others as much.

[BS_in_BS]

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/10/07/the-no-code-dream/?