[kasey_junk]

Excel is likely the most used IDE of all time. We’ve been living in the no code business application future for 40 years.

I can stand up a cluster of web servers that automatically scale to effectively infinite demand with a few clicks on the internet.

I can design a front end without paying attention to code and have been able to for 20 years.

No code is like AI. The goal posts keep moving. So you need to be more specific when you ask if it’s what’s next.

[yen223]

I feel like people here underestimate how much work can actually be done without having to write any code whatsoever.

There's the common cases with businesses being built on top of a pile of Excel spreadsheets. It is also easy to take for granted, but things like hosting your own website, or setting up an e-commerce service could be done without much code for a very long time now.

But the cool thing is that nowadays, it is possible to do more sophisticated things, like spinning up interactive web apps that are backed by self-hosted databases with authenticated APIs, all without writing a lot of code. Is this a good way to build things? Maybe. It wouldn't be the most maintainable stack, but the barrier to entry is pretty minimal, and that makes it worthwhile.

[ac29]

> businesses being built on top of a pile of Excel spreadsheets.

But, "=SUM(A1:A10)" is code. Spreadsheets have a visual layout and mental model different from other programming languages, but they are code none the less.

[csharptwdec19]

> It wouldn't be the most maintainable stack, but the barrier to entry is pretty minimal, and that makes it worthwhile.

I still don't know whether that's really true.

On one side, there's the observation I've made with low-code (having been at an org and bailing right around the time they started going down that road;) When I was at the 'free training' (just a sales pitch) most of the people there were from other medium to large size companies, a couple of those companies multinational.

B/c the sales pitch I've seen isn't to startups; it's to bigger orgs. It was actually pretty disturbing to listen to the sales rep explain as developers would leave through attrition/disgust at the product they could be replaced by 'non coders.' No, it wasn't exactly said like that but the sentiment was understood by all the developers (not managers) in the room.

Okay, so lets say that they clean up their sales act (lol) and actually start to go towards smaller business.

Those business are still going to wind up with a product that may or may not be maintainable long term, but are now guaranteed to be paying yearly licensing costs.

No thx.

[ksaj]

I used to use a spreadsheet in all my forensic reports. The ability to instantly sort between timeline and specific subjects or groups of subjects was extremely useful. Even during an investigations, you could coax out some connections and relevant details you might not notice in any other way.

Since I don't really do any math or accounting, I suppose spreadsheets are a type of flat-file database.