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by yen223 2183 days ago
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.
2 comments
ac29 2183 days ago
> 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.

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csharptwdec19 2183 days ago
> 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.

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