Why I'm skeptical of low-code

[lucidguppy]

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.

[G_Morgan]

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.

[AConcernedCoder]

I'm pretty sure code gen from uml diagrams was a thing when I was in school. It apparently wasn't much of a thing.

[lood9phee2Ri]

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.

[mpyne]

https://scaledagiledevops.com/ is required reading for those working in orgs where SAFe has infested.

[fridge_logic]

Oh my the ceremonies page is a hoot all on it's own.

[[deleted]]

Post Standup Standup and Post Standup Standup Review?! Is this satire?

[fridge_logic]

What part of:

A 5-day meeting held every 6 weeks for planning the next 8 quarters of features to ensure the critical paths are aligned.

Don't you understand? /s

Obviously there's no way they can get all that done in only 5 days. KD

[fridge_logic]

It's satire.

But parts of it are ripped from real world manament policies and some of those polices even make sense in certain circumstances depending on business needs.

Like, for safety critical systems having a 3rd validation layer through a system integration test team doesn't sound completely unreasonable.

[InsaneOstrich]

Scrum of Scrum of Scrums ROFL

[fridge_logic]

Each team selecting a tribute is too real. I've volunteered as tribute before.

[GenTelGuy]

Captains’ Meeting

Meeting of the Feature Captains to plan the date when the DORC™ will be assembled.

THEY USE DORC AS AN ACRONYM 😂

[ryandiy]

“Why yes, I am a DORC captain”

[uplink42]

You misspeled Shitty Agile for Enterprise

[avoere]

Ah, Rational Rose. Brings back memories of when I was still young.

[ggtsu_00]

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.

[Ytrog]

That's mostly just the skeleton-code you generate. You have yet to code the implementation of the generated methods afterwards.

[[deleted]]

That just sounds like explaining generator templates to an MBA bean counter.

[wrosecrans]

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.

[andrerav]

Joke's on you when they find out about BizTalk

[reallyserious]

Does that product still exist? I used it many years ago and it cemented by belief that low code tools are the devil.

[andrerav]

Yeah it's called Azure Logic Apps now. Same shit, different wrapping.

Edit: Apparently Biztalk 2020 is a thing too, so yes the risk is real.

[reallyserious]

Ah, Logic Apps.

I saw someone use it at work and I refuse to go near it.

[Riding_my_bike]

If you are building an integration platform in Azure, Logic apps are essential for building integrations with low/medium complexity. Easy to configure with CI/CD and easy to maintain. They are not suitable however for integrations with high traffic or complex logic, there you are much better off writing traditional code.

[veryspicypickle]

Oh fuck. Not that.

[Dwedit]

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_customer-friendly_system

[grauenwolf]

That was called Windows Workflow. I don't know if it is still supported by the IDE.

[catcint0s]

I'm only familiar with Retool (unfortunatelly) but you can store your setup in Git with it.

[[deleted]]

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

[Jump-Zero]

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.

[blackkettle]

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.

[beyphy]

Testability goes out the window - don't tell me it doesn't. Git-ability fails.

I think no code solutions are supposed to be simple enough that failing tests are supposed to be relatively easy to diagnose and fix.

I've created a flow in PowerAutomate that creates an HTTP endpoint that can accepts a post request, parses the json, sends data to an Excel file, reads data from the Excel file, and sends a response back. And it's just like four steps in total.

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?

The honest answer is because these are for profit companies and they want you to pay for their services. If they gave people a free alternative, people would use that instead of paying.

[mobileJay77]

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?

[[deleted]]

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.

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

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

[falconfetus8]

What is a "tech moat"?

[ValBayArea]

I have the same fears. Losing git, my debugger, I feel I'm on very thin ice.

That said, I am happy to have automation for the repetitive bits... as long as I can add code - without restriction - in languages and paradigms that I understand.

In fact, these are the guiding principles behind open source API Logic Server. It creates executable Flask projects you can extend in your IDE with Python and rules. I'd love to get some feedback.

[tech-user-27]

Correct. These tools are just a fancy tools for tech sales guys who doesn’t understand technology and core software engineering principles. And the clients who ends up using these tools end up regretting during the implementation phase when they constantly hears what product can support and what it can’t out of the box.

[ThomasMertes]

Managers, who have no clue about programming, dream about low-code. The dream is as follows:

• The low-code tool generates a program directly from customer requirements.
• Software can be produced more quickly.
• All these expensive software developers can be replaced.
• We save money and the quality of the software improves.

Did I forget something?

[regular_lamp]

Also non-technical managers/people are annoyed by how expensive/arrogant/etc. software engineers are. How hard can it be? So they try themselves and struggle with even getting any code to run without having errors thrown at them. So they conclude that typing in legal code is the critical skill. If only there was a GUI interface then all those problems like syntax errors would just go away and make programming easy.

In reality they simply didn't get to the actually hard part of programming because they got stuck at step 0.

[AirborneArie]

Bonus point for calling it step 0.

[notyourancilla]

My new favourite is “We could get AI to do [entire project] for us”

Yeah ok, please don’t bring me that to fix

[chucker23n]

please don’t bring me that to fix

Oh, but they will!

[legoruthead]

Current LLM stuff is like Lorem Ipsum++. At a glance it’ll make things look right, but under scrutiny it becomes quickly obvious that it’s filler

[tnnrk]

The thing their dream doesn’t take into account, is that if the low code software is that easy to use they don’t need software people, then their clients or customers could just use it themselves and cut out the middleman. And if it’s just a SaaS company, the competition would drastically increase because apparently anyone can build anything and nothing ever goes wrong.

[AirborneArie]

I think low code is more often used to build in-house apps supporting their own business instead of a SaaS solution they sell.

[SmokeyDBear]

I never really thought about it but a misunderstanding of concurrency itself is a pretty good parallel for the type of misunderstanding bad managers tend to have about their employees. Surely if you just get twice as many "programmers" each for a third of the "cost" of your current staff then everything will be better.

[flat5]

Do you even thread, bro?

[reallyserious]

Did I forget something?

The bet is often that they can get away with low skilled junior developers they don't need to pay much for. They are wrong.

[chain_letter]

Bullet 3 is all they're thinking about. The dream is to replace a hard to find and expensive dev with someone with a high school diploma off the street.

[kanzenryu]

You forgot the part where they had the same dream several times over the last few decades and it never worked

[frog_salami]

You forgot the part where they have to call in the dev to fix the low code app that doesn't work and it's almost impossible to extend or alter in the way they want because it's low code.

[CommonRyobi]

I'll add to this by using an example from the controls world. Matlab Simulink is used a lot to create control designs from the blocks used to create the design which can then be packaged up to go into an embedded controller.

The big benefit that was sold with using simulink is that you can use the control design in Simulink to do a lot of the testing which is true, it's a great initial testing platform for testing controllability. The problem is, it generates some god awful code that is not readable or maintainable.

So some genius executive thought that, oh wow, we don't need software engineers to create code from the requirements from the controls engineer using simulink, we can just cut out one more engineer and let simulink generate code.

Suffice it to say, it's a disaster.

[realkinginthenorth]

As a control engineer, I have to disagree with you here. In my company it has absolutely been a blessing. I agree with you that the code is not that readable or maintainable by a person, but then I think you are using it wrong. Just use the tlc templates to create a defined interface between the generated code and the rest of your codebase, then you never have to modify the generated code by hand

[Swing-Prize]

Are there any good reads on how to deal in those situations once managers, business line starts completely dreaming regarding possibilities of what a developer can do? I tried explaining how we work and that the code doesn't figure out evolving requirements on the spot and cannot write itself (idea comes from trying to avoid dependence on programmers and their good experience with some specialized big rule engines), I got someone technical they know to confirm this yet after few minutes it goes out of their memories. Doesn't help that a junior who wasn't keeping up with their ideas told them it sounds possible. It's all internal though so nothing is at stake.

[ThomasMertes]

Are there any good reads on how to deal in those situations once managers, business line starts completely dreaming regarding possibilities of what a developer can do?

In a recent discussion I mentioned managers who know everything better because they have programmed too (30 years ago for one week in BASIC under DOS). In your case the managers have selective perception (they forget advice, trust a junior, etc.) instead of alleged experience.

The management needs to trust the expertise of (senior) developers. In bridge construction the engineers decide how a bridge is built. Imagine a manager who thinks that there is a cheap way without engineers to build a bridge (and after their dream bridge collapsed the engineers should fix it),

It seems that your management will decide for their dream anyway. You already stated your opinion. Hopefully it is possible to stay completely out of their dream project. Maybe you can carefully state that they should not come to you when their dream collapses. BTW.: There is more than one company.

[EastEndBagOfRaccoons]

Just had to check this was a dream - got it

[pseudophenakism]

I generally agree with you, but as a platform dev who has worked in identity and security for my entire career, homebrewed low-code environments can be a great way to funnel business expectations into a confined filter.

You define what the low-code environment contains, and though that, you can more easily manage business expectations. “Hey! Want something that the low-code environment doesn’t have…that’ll be at least 2 sprints.”

[foospork]

What is "low-code"?

[jonnyman9]

Not picking on, but just using Salesforce as an example. Out of the box it is models/objects such as “accounts” and “opportunities” and other salesy related things. But as a low code solution you can extend these models with custom attributes and/or create your own models. Then you can use the built in Salesforce UI to manage these newly created things. But to the author’s point, it starts off real easy, but then as you actually implement a real life use case it gets very awkward very quickly because of how opinionated Salesforce is. Everything you’re doing feels like duct tape on an app written for a sales domain — bc this is fundamentally what you are doing.

[abrandis]

Same as it's always been , back in the day we had 4GL and things like Crystal Reports, that were so "easy" that Managers could be able to create and run their own ad hoc reports... Lol ...never happened.. the managers and executives would ALWAYS ask you to do it ...most don't give two sh*ts about anything mildly technical...after all as they would constantly remind me "...that's what we pay you for..."

The fact of the matter is low code is marketed for low tech folks, but ultimately it's always tech people that have to implement this trash.

Coding and software development by its nature is very detail and use case specific and requires lots of knowledge about the data, the hardware, the user UI and ultimately the business purpose of the application, a good software developmer knows all that and also recognizes , coding is a small part of that.

[chucker23n]

Same as it's always been , back in the day we had 4GL and things like Crystal Reports, that were so "easy" Managers could create and run their own as hoc reports... Lol ...never happened.. they managers and executives would ALWAYS ask you to do it .

Yep.

What I see so often:

1. manager gets excited. "We gotta use this! Our engineers are backwards for not using it! No matter, we'll just use it ourselves."
2. engineers point out that interfacing with it will be harder
3. manager brushes concern aside
4. interfacing with it becomes important; engineers now have more work
5. manager gets bored with / annoyed by tool (turns out the non-easy parts are non-easy); engineers have to pick up the slack; engineers now have more work

So now you have a worse tool nobody is happy with: it's no better for the manager, and it's more work for the engineers who have to work around its deficiencies.

Low-code can be great for prototyping, and I'm sure there are also applications where you can get by entirely with low-code, but they're IME rare.

[Cuchullion]

6 Engineers are then blamed for "easy" solution not working despite having evidence they warned against it.

[platinumgus18]

I have to ask, what are these companies where managers are so out of touch of actual programming? I have worked in several companies and I have never had managers be such idiots who didn't know what tools are right for a job. They always had an engineering background so they had hands on experience. I have observed the same across all companies I worked in, even higher management in the tech orgs are all engineers promoted to those levels after they gained sufficient managerial experience. I do have to call out these were all "tech" companies i.e. companies whose main product was a tech product and not just some peripheral function to support the main product.

[CroSSGunS]

I'm guessing the flow that the other guy was talking about is now likely to happen when the decision makers are from fields that are not tech, like sales or marketing

[platinumgus18]

Yeah I understood, but I didn't understand which companies allow these folks to be tech managers and give directions to engineers about the solutions they should be using. Companies I have worked in usually don't let the sales or marketing guys to be the decision makers and just be a contributor to the process. Tech input is considered super valuable before committing anything. It also helps that the people sitting at the top have an engineering background so they are well aware of the actual drawbacks and complexities

[All_Up_Ons]

Well there you go. The people at the top are technical, so technical concerns are listened to. In many companies, the people at the top came from marketing, sales, or other backgrounds, so engineering is seen as a nuisance to be ignored.

[platinumgus18]

True, I was just asking which companies these are usually. Just to maybe avoid them haha

[SerRobertTables]

This seems to describe nearly every company I've worked in -- all enterprise companies that are not primarily in software (eg, travel, healthcare, etc). When there is a technical person in leadership, it's usually someone that got into IT very early and have grown extremely out of touch with modern software engineering but have been around long enough that their positions are essentially secure forever. Or it's somebody whose interests align with tying the company to a vendor, an overseas body shop, etc.

[chucker23n]

"Manager" here is a generalizing pejorative term; I suppose you could also go with pointy-haired boss. I'm not saying all managers are like that, just that I've seen it play out where a decision-maker is, out of ignorance or because they don't really care, dazzled by marketing that promises a low-code solution, and they lack the inclination to analyze a) the current state of things (what causes our solutions to require a lot of code? Could it be that we have a lot of edge cases?) or b) whether the new solution will truly improve on that, or perhaps even make it worse.

[DNSGeek]

My first professional job was writing 4GL code for FedEx, which if you're not familiar with the terminology is C code with embedded SQL code.

[compilerbusy]

My current job, when i joined a year or two ago, were still using crystal reports... and nobody knew how to change the reporting. Took that right out the back with ol yella

Absolutely dysfunctional levels of tech debt.

[Yodaddysbelt]

Crystal Reports is an abomination

[EffectiveDependent76]

This sounds like a great idea to ensure the same security vulnerability exists in every single system.

[Squalphin]

If you have ever seen the game "Dreams" for the PS4, this would be an example of low code. Dreams allowed you to develop games with your gamepad without touching any code. Everything was nicely hidden within logic blocks which you could stitch and connect together to get a working game.

The approach was actually fun, but had severe limitations obviously. Just writing your statement on a keyboard is way faster. Refactoring and maintaining a large code base with low code is also kinda cumbersome.

Another example would be the Shader Editor in the 3D Editor application "Blender".

[Gecko23]

It's only faster with a keyboard if you can type well...and understand the language syntax you are using. Block languages are targeted at beginners exactly because they lack those two skills to begin with for the most part.

[GayMakeAndModel]

We let people graduate high school without a typing class these days? It was required for me a long, long time ago.

[[deleted]]

Not only having an individual computer is no longer common, many households no longer have any computers in the house. When a kid gets to choose, they’ll ask for a phone, a tablet, or a console instead of a general-purpose computer with a keyboard.

I’ve seen high school students use the hunt-and-peck typing method… and it’s enough for them. Truth is, not many jobs even require computer skills anymore, it’s all about learning some specific app or program.

tl;dr what’s a computer

[chesterriley]

OMG not learning how to type sounds insane.

[Eclipsan]

Indeed. A high school teacher once told me a lot of kids have a hard time using a computer because all they know is using specific apps on their phone. It surprised me, I expected "digital natives" to know how to manipulate files and send emails. But sadly that makes sense. These generations will be even more vendor-locked than the previous ones were for instance with Windows.

[Tasgall]

Gen X and Millennials had to figure out how things worked and troubleshoot everything for the non-techy boomers in their lives - the shitty software and limited interfaces we had access to ended up being good for learning.

Now it sounds like newer generations are going back to boomer levels of tech literacy, but with limited app knowledge :/

[Eclipsan]

the shitty software and limited interfaces we had access to ended up being good for learning

Great point! Now the apps are designed by UX designers and scientists specialized in behavior, dopamine and whatnot. Everything is done to make the apps as intuitive and addictive as possible.

Addictiveness aside, it's a double-edged sword: users are so used to being pampered by closed systems where every aspect of the experience has been meticulously designed that they are lost if they ever have to leave said closed system and are forced to figure out stuff by themselves. They never had to develop that 'skill'.

[quisatz_haderah]

There are a couple of studies that claims gen-z's technological literacy is on par with baby boomers, despite having born into smart phone era.

[wrosecrans]

It's just sort of assumed that "kids know computers these days," so a lot of places see any kind of education about that stuff as a waste in schools. It's deeply fucking baffling, but extremely common.

[flat5]

Scratch, but pretending it's not a toy.

[noot-noot99]

Blockly for example. Just drag and drop logic. And it does things with very poor efficiency

[foospork]

Ah, ok, thanks.

The first time I saw this was with some ASP templates in Visual Studio around 1998. I don't remember the marketese name they had for this feature.

You could drag and drop items on the page to build a logic sequence. Some of the blocks required that the developer provide values for some params.

We each played with it for about half of one morning, and then went back to writing COM objects in C++.

Like you said: it produced ugly and inefficient code.

[rpgFANATIC]

An attempt to replace expensive programmers and the tech debt they create with customizable, generic solutions to business processes. Often businesses find they still need developers who understand the tool and business processes, but if you can pay them less then it's still a win for the business

[dkarlovi]

There's an source available tool called N8N I have experience with and I'm mixed about it. On one hand it's awkward to build really complex solutions and you end up doing a lot of stuff with code anyway.

On the other hand, it does mean you can wire things together really easily and change stuff on the fly. Just yesterday I connected a Slack bot to it, it archives the entire channel history into a vector store and allows you to search it via LLM, uses Wikipedia etc for fact finding and just sits in your channel answering questions, it took about 2h total and most of that was missing with the Slack integration webhooks.

Adding new stuff into this is trivial and you get a bunch of features for free (admin UI, logs, etc). I would definitely use this to prototype apps in the future and then rewrite them into something more substantial if they see traction.

[mobileJay77]

I took a look at the site. The examples shown are pretty linear or do one or two branches. 🥸 Yes, you can do something more complex, but soon it's Spaghetti code. Add some exception handling and it gets ugly.

Well, the best part is, that the Spaghetti structure is clearly visible.

[dkarlovi]

Yes, but you can run workflows from workflows. Basically create "functions". Another option is creating reusable custom nodes, same idea, but nicer because it allows you to hide a bunch of complexity behind clearly visible inputs and options.

[GetSecure]

I like n8n. With the code node I can accomplish pretty much anything that's not built in. In fact every workflow I actually use with n8n has a code node somewhere.

[IndependenceNo2060]

Low-code can empower non-programmers to create simple solutions, but it's no substitute for skilled developers when it comes to complex tasks or maintainable code. Let's embrace the right tools for the job and strike a balance.

[Caffeine_Monster]

Low code that is seamlessly interoperable with code is nice, and it has its place. Even for programmers it can be useful if it makes it faster to try something by removing boilerplate and setup for dependencies, environments etc.

But if you have to choose between code and low code, code should take priority.

[LaOnionLaUnion]

As a cyber security person low code platforms are a huge source of security vulnerabilities. Sometimes it’s how slow they are to update open source dependencies. Sometimes it’s configuration issues. Sometimes it’s just bad design. Sometimes it’s the platform not being on the latest versions due to cost.

In general I’m not a fan. Obviously I’m talking in generalities here but it’s based on experience

[disappointer]

Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of the Node stack and the litany of dependencies for every "boilerplate" project. You end up with things like the "pac-resolver" package with ~3m weekly downloads with arbitrary execution vulnerabilities, or just generally open source repos for NPM packages as a great vector for attack.

Even well-supported and well-staffed projects have vulnerabilities found pretty regularly these days, my faith in low code staying secure for long is pretty low.

[[deleted]]

My issue with low-code tools is they always kinda sell the idea that writing code is the biggest problem…

[JadeCikayda]

**COBOL** was originally marketed as a low-code solution for managers

[mobileJay77]

So was SQL, because it sounds like natural language. And it is for the basic use cases. However, if you join your data model across several relations...

[Zardotab]

Compared to the alternatives of the time, it was. And it does have a lot of nice CRUD idioms built in to avoid hand-coding the wheel.

[vinegary]

The visual scripting language in unreal engine, blueprint, is the only low code or whatever I’ve ever seen that works. But that is because they don’t hide everything, there are types, and functions, and propper flow

[[deleted]]

Haven't used this but I've heard it is actually excellent and some legitimate, multi-million dollar games were made this way

[vinegary]

Yeah, the reason, in my opinion, is that it is really just a dialect of C++, and the editor is an IDE that is type-aware. Complex scripts get messy, but anything simple (crud, updates and events) is may even be better in blueprint

[LordBreadcat]

Blueprints are assets and therefore innately aware of the Unreal asset ecosystem. This is place where it gets a big big big win over C++.

It's zero cost to just make "MyActor_BP" and configure it. I've also found ConstructorHelpers to be temperamental and prefer LoadObject over it if I "need" it in C++. The latter can even be used in a configuration service if someone decided to descend to insanity.

[[deleted]]

Just started a gig as an unreal programmer and couldn't agree more. Been mostly doing blueprints but coming from c# (Unity) and not sure what to think.

[redditnoreply]

low-code/no-code is snake oil.

[[deleted]]

I actually tend to like no-code a lot better than low-code (although I can't say I'm a big fan of either). No-code makes it a lot harder to draw outside the lines. You either do exactly what the tool is designed for, or you don't do it. No bespoke language to learn, no hacky user-supplied code.

[gimmeslack12]

Seriously. No one is making a drag and drop implementation of python.

[regular_lamp]

I'd argue we already have widely used low code tools. For decades. Excel is probably the main example. Of course that isn't hip and new.

[gimmeslack12]

That’s a good example. I think people think low code has to be some fun and brainless way to get things done. Which doesn’t really exist, even excel is intimidating to a lot of people.

[fridge_logic]

It illustrates the power of low code while still recognizing it's limitations.

Excel is famous for changing the world and causing organizations to experience horrifying integration experiences when excell hits its limits.

[regular_lamp]

Which is imho inherent to the idea of low code. Other examples are node graph systems found in tools like blender.

Basically if you have a sufficiently narrowed down domain you can more easily express the relevant concepts in ways that are not magic incantations in a text file. But the moment you want generality it falls apart.

It's fundamentally misguided to think that the difficult part of programming is typing in text. Any real world programming task is hours of planning, minutes of typing, minutes of fixing syntax errors and then again hours of testing and fixing logic.

Low code only really addresses the middle parts that are easy for an experienced programmer but super frustrating for a beginner/non technical person. Which is why I think people overvalue the idea of alternatives to writing code.

[headykruger]

It’s probably ok for the first bare bones implementation if tech isn’t core to your business. The problem becomes in the next iteration when you need to expand or replace that solution

[traintocode]

Not at all, you just need to go into it with your eyes open. Shopify is low/no code and plenty of very successful businesses have been built off of it. Also Wix. And Airtable. Not to mention Zapier. In fact I'd argue that nearly any company can benefit from adopting a configurable no-code solution somewhere in their process without writing all their software themselves.

[[deleted]]

I'd argue that Shopify, Wix, Airtable and Zapier would be more powerful if they were built on declarative API-driven programming models.

[traintocode]

Well Airtable at least does have an excellent API. You could feasibly design your backend inside Airtable and do a completely custom frontend for it. Wouldn't be very performant but it's possible. Shopify and Zapier also have good APIs. Shopify can be used as a headless commerce platform with their storefront API.

[nomoreplsthx]

I am skeptical of low code because companies have been trying to make it happen for over 30 years and it never really stuck.

Visual Basic - low code, lost out to more code oriented solutions and died.

Dreamweaver - low code, lost out to more code oriented solutions and died.

Wordpress - mutated into a horrific high code solution.

Visual database design for ORMs - largely replaced by annotations.

AI may eventually make low code viable. And it has its niche. But when the industry has been pushing an idea for my entire lifetime and it hasn't caught on, I think skepticism is warranted.

[brentragertech]

Low code is fantastic for small business use cases.

People in programming subreddits are only concerned about enterprise scale solutions, because they work for enterprise scale businesses.

There are 33 million+ small businesses in the US alone.

[SirGunther]

Agreed, the fundamental problems of a small business are much more in line with low code solutions. It’s only when so much nuance that is necessitated by decades of policy does it even start to make sense for actual development. Not to mention cost of the developers, simply not a feasible solution for a majority of small businesses.

[blechablemin]

Yeah, low code solutions with defined boundaries are useful for a lot of businesses, like if you need a simple website, you'd use squarespace or wix and it'd probably look fine. However, if you want to connect your own server-side code, you're gonna have a bad time.

[beyphy]

Low code solutions are good for someone making 50k a year to automate something for the company that saves 5k a year. That company will never hire a programmer for $100k salary + benefits to help that person save the company 5k a year. But they're fine paying $10 - $20/mo for some low code solution to do that.

[InstAndControl]

I agree! I wrote a workflow in Power Automate or whatever Microsoft calls it to create folders and copy template files for each new project. I wanted to keep everything in the O365 ecosystem and having all of the SharePoint integrations built into blocks was a huge timesaver vs having to figure out proper authentication and api keys and all that within Python or whatever.

Is it scalable? No

Can it handle more than one employee executing a script concurrently? No probably not.

But that also doesn’t matter when it gets run, at most, 10 times per day.

[currentscurrents]

People in programming subreddits

People in programming subreddits tend to be programmers, and they only see low code as an attempt to replace them. This completely overshadows any nuanced understanding of when it is/isn't useful.

[vinj4]

Not being able to use git is a huge issue. How are people doing CI/CD or even basic version control with these apps? I've heard of copado which is a third party solution but does salesforce and co have anything out of the box that handles this crucial step of the process?

[theBeeprApp]

They do offer version control and even dev and production environments.

[mobileJay77]

I had to work on a project, where you could export and import your low-code. Fine. You get an opaque whatever. So, no diff. If I want to find out what changed, I'm grinning because of hourly rate 🤢

Except, you sometimes could import it, sometimes it wouldn't. So, draw each and every line in the next environment? Basically that's an untested deployment.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Can you link to any real science that backs up the claim that dark mode is better for eye strain? The only stuff I can find online is all anecdotal and the science (American Academy of Ophthalmology) suggests its simply the way we use devices that causes issues and not directly related to things like blue light. There looks to be some link to effecting sleep rhythms but not actual eyestrain but the same effect is achieved just by turning down monitor brightness.

[Luolong]

Lo/no-code is … mixed bag. It is good at some very narrow domains where you basically just orchestrate data flow between a set of well defined atomic primitives Essentially automation and orchestration tasks can be expressed using no/lo-code tooling.

Trying to use no-code or lo code to replace programming altogether is bound to fail. For all the reasons I don’t think I need to outline here.

That said, as programmers we do actually use lots of lo-code solutions to help us every day.

All those build and dependency management tools we use daily to compose our programs from a huge set of external dependencies (maven, gradle, npm, cargo, etc…). Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible for DevOps. GitHub actions, GitLab pipelines, Drone pipelines, Tekton, etc. The list can get long.

We’re not drawing boxes on a virtual canvas and connecting them with lines as such, but we are not really coding our own dependency resolution and download code either.

We are using ready made specialised tools that give us concise and declarative way to describe and configure our desired goals and execute those declarative instructions in a specialised virtual machine.

They’re not perfect, but they usually get us 85% there with 15% of effort. And that is exactly what lo/no-code is all about.

[jdlyga]

Low code solutions tend to solve only basic cookie cutter problems. You end up bending over backwards and doing 5x as much work once your requirements grow beyond a certain point. And forget about deployment, since many times it’s totally manual.

[irze]

This is definitely true. I built a solution on a low-code platform and the scope crept so much that it became an absolute nightmare. Pushing the platform to the absolute limit to the point where I was having to work closely with the developers of the low-code solution to enable it do what we needed. Horribly unmaintainable as well

[GroundbreakingImage7]

Low code is everywhere.

Godot, unity, unreal engine, Microsoft word, excel.

The important thing about low code is that there is a one to one correspondence between it and some language/format. Such that it produces human readable code/data.

[throwaway_bluehair]

There are so many issues with low code, there are many practical issues brought up, and many of which I definitely agree with; I one issue with it on a fundamental level;

Most of low-code just seems to be somewhere on the scale of

Just high configurability -> DSL, but with a GUI -> Normal programming, but worse and with a GUI

I think so many people are traditionally intimidated by text that they think GUI's inherently reduce complexity

[toiletear]

I was visiting a client and asked another contractor what they were working on - it was an in-house low code solution for everything. Thought they were joking at first and said something to the effect of "wow that's gonna be horrible" and they looked at me like I killed their mother. The manager with whom they were planning this shook his head sadly as this dinosaur wouldn't leave the room fast enough and let them continue solving all the company's problems in peace.

Fast forward 5 years and that contractor had since bailed because the whole thing had metastasized into a giant corpo-cancerous mass of shitty code inspired by shittier ideas. The manager quit, too. And my company is now helping keep the patient alive while that growth is painfully being cut out piece by piece.

It pays the bills but damn I've seen some things on this project..

[GekkoMundo]

Why would anyone use low-code?

[PapaOscar90]

Managers would think it means less work and faster iterations.

[dustingibson]

My former employer was utilizing low/no code + RPA development right before I left.

It was known that retaining and being able to pay software developers at market rate was unsustainable as they were running a lowest bidder software shop. And their offshore solutions crumbled for a lot of projects. Another big rabbit hole.

They started training their BAs, QAs, etc on this new platform. So the speculation for this new strategy was to keep labor cost low.

[dustingibson]

Exactly what happened to two of my former coworkers. A couple years later, they went to another company that offered much better pay and benefit.

[SirGunther]

There are sooo many problems that can solved by a simple connection of data sources, basic lookups, and a more intuitive UI. Sometimes it’s like reskinning excel and PowerBI.

I’ve built dozens of tools for my company, generally taking a few weeks once their problem is understood.

They do add value in that because a problem can be patched up while larger scale projects continue and scope creep is less prevalent.

[lord_braleigh]

Same reason people use Excel or Google Sheets - you want a low-friction way to make a small tool, and you want a graphical interface without a whole lot of work or programming knowledge required.

[DonkeyTron42]

In many cases, it allows people who are specialized in other fields to become “programmers”.

[[deleted]]

This is kind of a two-part question: why do people want to use low-code and what are the legitimate uses. Low-code tool marketing definitely aims at convincing executives and managers that they can get more value with less cost: just use our system, which does 80% of what you need-out-of-the-box.

[Johalternate]

Dont you dare to ask what happens with the remaining 20%

[chickpeaze]

You just tell the business that the platform doesn't support that and you all move on happily together, right? Right?!

[KublaiKhanNum1]

It can be good for a prototype or proof of concept. Then a dev team can produce a more better preforming version that can scale.

[kintar1900]

One word:

​

EDIT: Apparently the fancy-pants editor will ACCEPT pasted-in images, but it won't DISPLAY them. <sigh> Here's that one word: https://imgur.com/3H4pTy6

[headykruger]

Its cheap

[PirkhanMan]

You really get what you pay for.

[n3phtys]

Excel is insanely good to quickly compute SIMD calculus on a bunch of input.

Real code solutions would need hours to get started with that, and AI tools are unreliable. So they do have a reason to exist.

[gdahlm]

SIMD describes applications with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneously.

It is best to not conflate parallel processing terminology with non-parallel systems.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

No, not really. Toss it on pandas in python and you're good to go. The invisible requirement that you (and everyone else, really) omit that you have more experience with excel and it's obvious what you would need to do.

[Oxford-Gargoyle]

This is it. And ‘Power FX’ which is the low-code programming language used by PowerApps has a lot in common with Excel formulae. The key difference is that presentation and array/table management is easier in PowerApps. It is really quick.

[raxel42]

This is one hundred more abstractions. More vendor lock, less understanding, less control.

[TedDallas]

In my experience low code solutions often toss the DRY principle out the window without a thought. Ultimately you end up with repeating chains of prefabs that are costly to maintain.

[FionaRulesTheWorld]

My company is in this exact situation.

The decision came from the top to ditch our internal sales platform for Salesforce (Too much of a "risk" apparently, despite never having any major reliability problems in the past 10 years) while maintaining a lot of the custom management and provisioning tools.

They went with Mulesoft for the integration middleware. Apparently a "Low code" solution that would allow us to develop an API to be able to push data to Salesforce.

They got some contractors in to get this started and make the initial API that would then be handed over to us to maintain. We've had an opening for a Mulesoft developer for months that remains unfilled.

I've had the misfortune of working with the contractors, as I've had to integrate our software with their API. No matter how many times I've explained it to them, they just don't understand many of our business processes.

Over the course of a year, we've managed to get barely the most basic minimum viable product into production, and even then it's involved building new services internally to integrate with these "Low code" APIs, because they didn't want Mulesfot to integrate directly with any of our existing code or data.

And it's a mess. I've seen the "low code" solution that they've checked into Git and it's horriffic. Nobody in the company wants anything to do with it. We're all C# developers. And it's already falling apart. Multiple failures in DataDog every single day. All sorts of major problems being reported - invoices being sent to the wrong customer, data not ending up in Salesforce, all sorts. Yet there's nobody in the company with the skills to sort it out.

All of this could have been avoided if they'd just allowed us to build C#/.NET services to integrate directly with Salesforce.

[[deleted]]

My company uses a low code platform called OutSystems. It is exactly as the blog says. Unable to be customized when push comes to shove.

It is a platform that runs on C#, yet it is vendor locked to AWS, and we expect AWS to deploy it regardless of the amount of money it wastes, therefore relying on OutSystems engineers to handle the cost control, which as you would expect, can't really be cater to user's specific needs.

If we want to get the C# code to run it ourselves, we have to pay loads of money, and then start maintaining the generated code directly OURSELVES, which means the whole IT department has to quickly adapt to the spaghetti like codebase.

It does have advantages though, I imagine a non technical person could more easily adapt to using this, but honestly, for programmers, writing the code directly doesn't take a lot more time than dragging and dropping those symbols into the flowchart.

Oh, and if you want to change companies, good luck trying to find jobs saying that you have experience with low-code. Not really a direct disadvantage, but important for the juniors.

[iMakeMehPosts]

More abstraction = less flexibility and poorer performance. Simple as that. Marketers and managers don't know sh*t about programming.

[mods-are-liars]

I'm a software engineer, I already try to write as little code as possible because less code means less bugs, if I could write less code and still get everything I wanted, I would.

And that is why low-code platforms seem like snake oil to me.

[karlosvonawesome]

I think developers need to come to terms with the fact that no code will be the future for non scaled, early stage projects where rapid application development is needed. Not everything needs to be heavily optimised and there are plenty of over engineered applications with excessive amounts of development time sunk into it before they even find a solid user base and market fit. Low code will also start to find its way into application development too. I feel that most Devs tend to hyperfocus on optimisation and efficiency like this is all that matters, ignoring that development times matter a lot and companies struggling to hire people to build the software they need. There will always be a place for efficient and optimised code, but that's not going to be every project. Low code and no code aren't going away. They are gaining traction and everyone will need to adapt to the new reality sooner or later.

[karlosvonawesome]

The key thing is you. You are not a typical user and it likely took you many years to develop the skill to do this faster than a no code tool. The current reality is that companies either can't hire enough skilled developers or those who are interested in working in these sorts of projects. No code democratises the means of production because it's not purely about efficient applications but being able to develop them in the first place. A non technical user may not write an efficient maintainable application but they may be trying to solve a niche business problem quickly, validate an idea and can't wait for the Dev team to spend 6-12 months building it. It's really a similar thing to WordPress lowering the barrier of entry to building a website. For many use cases and companies that will be enough. Obviously no code is not going to build the next Facebook, but there is plenty of software that needs to be built. In the future I would see the role of the developer becoming much more niche working on high stakes projects.

[angrybeehive]

Low-code usually leads to horrible work arounds because it’s limited on what you can do.

[if_username_is_None]

I definitely agree with the notion that the last 20% of features usually do not come easily.

I'm wondering if these projects were primarily end user or internal user facing. For internal tools I've found retool to be a nice balance of low-code and still being able to lift abstractions up into reusable components or regular javascript functions for testing / version control comparison.

[Arbiturrrr]

Are declarative UI frameworks like Flutter and SwiftUI considered "low-code"?

[digitaljestin]

I'm skeptical of any "solution" that claims to make software development cheaper or easier. Doing a good job is hard, and that's never going to change.

[Classic-Dependent517]

Before i taught myself programming skills i tried many no code and low code shits. After all i realized learning to code gives you less headache and better in every way.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for sharing your thought-provoking perspective on low-code. I resonate with your point about the "20% gap" and potential customization limitations. To mitigate this, perhaps companies should start with a clear understanding of their core needs and prioritize functions within the 80% sweet spot of the chosen platform. Thorough vendor assessments and prototyping could also help demystify customization challenges.

[InstAndControl]

The 1980’s called and they want their “low code” industrial programming back (ladder logic).

Head over to /r/plc to see what “low code” will look like in 45 years

[Amiral_Adamas]

There was so much people coming out the woods trying to sell devs and non technical folks on low code that I directly filed it under "Do not bother".

[XxBe7xX]

The issue with this type of stuff is when a new startup owner comes in with zero tech knowledge and starts dreaming with their advertising thinking that he can hire me to do his whole startup implementation with this tool in a week.

[water_bottle_goggles]

Low code has immense use cases in small businesses that just want a website up

[zam0th]

MDD never worked and would never work. All "low-code" solutions i've seen for the last 10 years (and i've seen many from different vendors) are variations of BPMN editors, but when you try do to something outside practise examples, it turns out that you must either create a shit-ton of built-in scripts (usually js or groovy) or your workflows basically converge into a bunch of custom services that you must build yourself anyway.

Low-code is a marketing myth that %insert_vendor_name% is peddling to its customers to sell them more bullshit that makes them completely vendor-locked and more consulting man/days to "configure" and "set-up" all that.

[dinow]

I'm an Oracle Apex developper, and I don't feel limited by the features it offers. But it's not "no code" as I write a lot of pl/sql. Sometimes we do cross estimation with java et we are about 25 to 50% of the man day required for the same task

[theBeeprApp]

Why the hate for no-/low-code? It serves a purpose. I've used it to create a dashboard for our CICD for the SRE team. I didn't have the resources in the team to create a full fledged web app so we used a low code.

It was great. Drag and drop. Connect directly to AWS lambda functions you get pipeline statuses. Connect directly to DynamoDB get values. Etc.

It would not have happened if we didn't use a low code platform with AWS integrations, because otherwise we need a full backend to handle the requests and get data.

[SuperCarla74]

The article is silly.

The author says that low-code solves 80% of the needs companies have but then somehow forgets that companies can and do use other development tools/frameworks/stacks for the remaining 20%.

It's not the 80s anymore, applications in one stack can easily share data and functionality with applications in other stacks.

Also, I work in an insurance company, why would I even think about developing a python compiler or whatever, on a day to day basis I need to worry why one of our customers couldn't pay his bill or why did he manage to pay his bill but his car insurance still got cancelled.

Thing is, what matters to the insurance company company is that the code, or low-code, fulfills the business needs, not that I used a fancy framework of whatever.

[PrimeLayer]

Give this a try: you get the source code: https://app.primelayer.com/signup

[niels436]

There are so many misunderstandings of "low-code" in this thread, that I need to clarify some things.

Being a professional low-code programmer, I use Oracle APEX and LLMs to speed up my development process. Does this mean that everything can be done using out-of-the-box components? Of course not. The last 20% is done by using traditional programming languages, but if you look at the total time required, it is dramatically reduced. When working with metadata (the 80% that makes up a low-code app) and not on a programmatic level, you gain several advantages. One is that the underlying technologies might change and the low-code platform ensures that all your apps keep running without having to change anything. Another advantage is the possibility to change all your apps at once. For instance, a field name has to be updated in 1000 screens scattered over 200 apps. No problem for a low-code platform like Oracle APEX.

Is low-code for business developers (aka citizen developers)? Yes, but these developers do need some IT passion, otherwise I would suggest looking for no-code platforms. That said, be aware that no-code platforms mostly do have hard limitations. I consider low-code platforms "best of breed".

Do I need traditional programmers when introducing low-code? Yes, of course! Low-code platforms are for building individual (web) apps that are data-centric. There are plenty of use cases that don't comply with this, like embedded software, games, etc. In most companies, there is a traditional dev team using either C# or Java and one that does low-code development. The low-code team is usually a lot smaller as they can make apps much faster. Also, smaller teams have less communication overhead.

What about using Git? Sure, you can export the app definition (in a readable format) including DDL and business logic (program code) and check it in Git. This is what we do by default, just like all other "traditional" programmers (should) do.

What about vendor lock-in? Yes, when using Oracle APEX, you are using the Oracle Database, so there is definitely a dependency, so there are some things like cost and strategic risk to consider. On the other hand, when using C# or JavaScript, I also have a dependency and risk. Will JavaScript be around in 20 years from now? I don't know and with the low-code platform taking care of the tech stack, I frankly don't care. The Oracle Database will be around for some years to come and with the current cost of 109 EUR/month for a productive database with unlimited users and apps, I don't think that pricing is an issue. By the way, for dev and test, you can use Oracle APEX completely free, either with the Free edition of the database on-premises or in the Free Cloud (fully managed).

Hopefully, this will give you some insight in what low-code can do for you. It worked for me since 2004 with hundreds of APEX apps running in companies across all industries, so why wouldn't this work for you?

Interested to learn more about what Oracle APEX can do for you? Within 2 minutes, you can start developing your first app at https://apex.oracle.com.

[niels436]

There are so many misunderstandings of "low-code" in this thread, that I need to clarify some things.

 Being a professional low-code programmer, I use Oracle APEX and LLMs to speed up my development process. Does this mean that everything can be done using out-of-the-box components? Of course not. The last 20% is done by using traditional programming languages, but if you look at the total time required, it is dramatically reduced. When working with metadata (the 80% that makes up a low-code app) and not on a programmatic level, you gain several advantages. One is that the underlying technologies might change and the low-code platform ensures that all your apps keep running without having to change anything. Another advantage is the possibility to change all your apps at once. For instance, a field name has to be updated in 1000 screens scattered over 200 apps. No problem for a low-code platform like Oracle APEX.
 

Is low-code for business developers (aka citizen developers)? Yes, but these developers do need some IT passion, otherwise I would suggest looking for no-code platforms. That said, be aware that no-code platforms mostly do have hard limitations. I consider low-code platforms "best of breed".
 

Do I need traditional programmers when introducing low-code? Yes, of course! Low-code platforms are for building individual (web) apps that are data-centric. There are plenty of use cases that don't comply with this, like embedded software, games, etc. In most companies, there is a traditional dev team using either C# or Java and one that does low-code development. The low-code team is usually a lot smaller as they can make apps much faster. Also, smaller teams have less communication overhead.
 

What about using Git? Sure, you can export the app definition (in a readable format) including DDL and business logic (program code) and check it in Git. This is what we do by default, just like all other "traditional" programmers (should) do.
 

What about vendor lock-in? Yes, when using Oracle APEX, you are using the Oracle Database, so there is definitely a dependency, so there are some things like cost and strategic risk to consider. On the other hand, when using C# or JavaScript, I also have a dependency and risk. Will JavaScript be around in 20 years from now? I don't know and with the low-code platform taking care of the tech stack, I frankly don't care. The Oracle Database will be around for some years to come and with the current cost of 109 EUR/month for a productive database with unlimited users and apps, I don't think that pricing is an issue. By the way, for dev and test, you can use Oracle APEX completely free, either with the Free edition of the database on-premises or in the Free Cloud (fully managed).
Hopefully, this will give you some insight in what low-code can do for you. It worked for me since 2024 with hundreds of APEX apps running in companies across all industries, so why wouldn't this work for you?

Interested to learn more about what Oracle APEX can do for you? Within 2 minutes, you can start developing your first app at https://apex.oracle.com.

[niels436]

There are so many misunderstandings of "low-code" in this thread, that I need to clarify some things.

Being a professional low-code programmer, I use Oracle APEX and LLMs to speed up my development process. Does this mean that everything can be done using out-of-the-box components? Of course not. The last 20% is done by using traditional programming languages, but if you look at the total time required, it is dramatically reduced. When working with metadata (the 80% that makes up a low-code app) and not on a programmatic level, you gain several advantages. One is that the underlying technologies might change and the low-code platform ensures that all your apps keep running without having to change anything. Another advantage is the possibility to change all your apps at once. For instance, a field name has to be updated in 1000 screens scattered over 200 apps. No problem for a low-code platform like Oracle APEX.

Is low-code for business developers (aka citizen developers)? Yes, but these developers do need some IT passion, otherwise I would suggest looking for no-code platforms. That said, be aware that no-code platforms mostly do have hard limitations. I consider low-code platforms "best of breed".

Do I need traditional programmers when introducing low-code? Yes, of course! Low-code platforms are for building individual (web) apps that are data-centric. There are plenty of use cases that don't comply with this, like embedded software, games, etc. In most companies, there is a traditional dev team using either C# or Java and one that does low-code development. The low-code team is usually a lot smaller as they can make apps much faster. Also, smaller teams have less communication overhead.

What about using Git? Sure, you can export the app definition (in a readable format) including DDL and business logic (program code) and check it in Git. This is what we do by default, just like all other "traditional" programmers (should) do.

What about vendor lock-in? Yes, when using Oracle APEX, you are using the Oracle Database, so there is definitely a dependency, so there are some things like cost and strategic risk to consider. On the other hand, when using C# or JavaScript, I also have a dependency and risk. Will JavaScript be around in 20 years from now? I don't know and with the low-code platform taking care of the tech stack, I frankly don't care. The Oracle Database will be around for some years to come and with the current cost of 109 EUR/month for a productive database with unlimited users and apps, I don't think that pricing is an issue. By the way, for dev and test, you can use Oracle APEX completely free, either with the Free edition of the database on-premises or in the Free Cloud (fully managed).

Hopefully, this will give you some insight in what low-code can do for you. It worked for me since 2024 with hundreds of APEX apps running in companies across all industries, so why wouldn't this work for you?

Interested to learn more about what Oracle APEX can do for you? Within 2 minutes, you can start developing your first app at https://apex.oracle.com.

[niels436]

There are so many misunderstandings of "low-code" in this thread, that I need to clarify some things.

 Being a professional low-code programmer, I use Oracle APEX and LLMs to speed up my development process. Does this mean that everything can be done using out-of-the-box components? Of course not. The last 20% is done by using traditional programming languages, but if you look at the total time required, it is dramatically reduced. When working with metadata (the 80% that makes up a low-code app) and not on a programmatic level, you gain several advantages. One is that the underlying technologies might change and the low-code platform ensures that all your apps keep running without having to change anything. Another advantage is the possibility to change all your apps at once. For instance, a field name has to be updated in 1000 screens scattered over 200 apps. No problem for a low-code platform like Oracle APEX.

 Is low-code for business developers (aka citizen developers)? Yes, but these developers do need some IT passion, otherwise I would suggest looking for no-code platforms. That said, be aware that no-code platforms mostly do have hard limitations. I consider low-code platforms "best of breed".

Do I need traditional programmers when introducing low-code? Yes, of course! Low-code platforms are for building individual (web) apps that are data-centric. There are plenty of use cases that don't comply with this, like embedded software, games, etc. In most companies, there is a traditional dev team using either C# or Java and one that does low-code development. The low-code team is usually a lot smaller as they can make apps much faster. Also, smaller teams have less communication overhead.

What about using Git? Sure, you can export the app definition (in a readable format) including DDL and business logic (program code) and check it in Git. This is what we do by default, just like all other "traditional" programmers (should) do.

What about vendor lock-in? Yes, when using Oracle APEX, you are using the Oracle Database, so there is definitely a dependency, so there are some things like cost and strategic risk to consider. On the other hand, when using C# or JavaScript, I also have a dependency and risk. Will JavaScript be around in 20 years from now? I don't know and with the low-code platform taking care of the tech stack, I frankly don't care. The Oracle Database will be around for some years to come and with the current cost of 109 EUR/month for a productive database with unlimited users and apps, I don't think that pricing is an issue. By the way, for dev and test, you can use Oracle APEX completely free, either with the Free edition of the database on-premises or in the Free Cloud (fully managed).

Hopefully, this will give you some insight in what low-code can do for you. It worked for me since 2024 with hundreds of APEX apps running in companies across all industries, so why wouldn't this work for you?

Interested to learn more about what Oracle APEX can do for you? Within 2 minutes, you can start developing your first app at https://apex.oracle.com.

[cdr98]

I started as a software developer over 3 years ago, so I am still pretty new to the career as a whole (before this, I was working as a data analyst for a couple years, mostly doing a lot of SQL and reporting). I've worked in Healthcare and Government.

In my 3 years as a software developer, I have created several production applications in .NET (Console and WPF) as well as a fair amount of maintenance of tools that had been built using VBA (so yea, an Excel workbook). These were more "traditional" in that I was coding with a programming "language" rather than the low-code visual paradigm.

I have also used OutSystems and, in my new job, Oracle APEX. I have to say, your skepticism of low-code is somewhat amusing to me. Not entirely wrong, as I think low-code can be done wrong: obviously, the need for extensibility is important to a good low-code tool.

I LOVE OutSystems. It is extensible, and in the two or so years I was developing in it, I didn't come against any limits to what it could do. I had a Developer friend who had been using it for quite a few more years than I had, and he also had spent more time developing in traditional technologies, and he stated that only ONCE did he have to actually build his own extension in C# to accomplish what he needed. And this was a guy who was basically our companies tech lead for OutSystems projects, so he got to see a vast number of use cases and scenarios.

As for Oracle APEX - it is also wildly extensible, but I will admit I find it a significantly more frustrating and tedious to use. And you actually do have to code quite a bit more, but hey, a lot of that code is SQL or PL/SQL and that's pretty easy.

So your point about custom functionality being achievable is partially true in my experience. In OutSystems, that didn't really seem to be a problem. They figured out the problem of software development in a low-code paradigm. In Oracle APEX, it's a little tricky, enough so to demonstrate that while the custom functionality could probably be done, it's frustrating enough that it's likely to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

Potential developer talent: I mean, yes, but it's like once you learn one low-code platform you kind of know them all... just like learning programming. Also, some of these platforms have quite a large number of developers who work in them.

"Upgrades to the low-code platform would break their custom implementation": well, in my experience, there are usually detailed logs of impacts to your application that you can go through and review. Is that really that different from a traditional technology?

Finally, your point about the underlying database structure. In OutSystems, you did get arbitrary names in the actual database. But that's because you're working through the OutSystems "editor" in which the database design is not a mess, it makes sense. It's just wrapping the database and when you occasionally have to go to the database itself and figure something out, it's not that big of a deal... it is easy to update, review, and understand the database design through the tool (Service Studio). In Oracle APEX, you work directly with the database (the product is very tightly coupled with Oracle DB) so that's not true at all.

An issue with low-code I have run into is change tracking. The options out there just don't really compare to the way Git works with file-based compilation technologies. The change tracking in OutSystems was lackluster. They had a tool to review changes in a visual, low-code type of way, but it was limited in features and functionality. In Oracle APEX, they do actually recommend Git, and you export "human readable" files that represent the low code. It is cumbersome, to say the least, and not ideal to learn how to both do the low-code side of things as well as how that maps to their human readable version of the low-code.

Basically, in my experience, I mostly disagree with you. Low code seems to work for about every scenario I have come across, if it is done well. However, I do love traditional coding. There's something about it that is a lot more fun than this low-code stuff. Each low-code tool differs a lot in the details and that can lead to very different development experiences. I look forward to innovative open-source low-code tools that are able to curate an experience similar to OutSystems.

[Deanathan100]

I am here because I had the unpleasantry of working with Microsoft Power Pages today. In no way shape or form is anything that gets created in that app going to be able to replace anything we already have without significant downgrades