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I think one of the issues of nolocode is it doesn't actually help people think like programmers, but the tools are often created with the implicit need to do that, a need which the creators don't see because they are coders. People get spreadsheets and word documents. I don't really know why. But they get them. But while it might seem like the step from doc/xls to nolocode is small or even non-existent, I think it actually is really big for most people who are supposed to be the audience for that (complete non developers). I think one reason is because people don't want the responsibility to make a system that can break. I'm not too sure if this is the only or the biggest reason, but I think non-coders don't have the sense that they can build things, and even if you show them they can using some hot tool, it seems they're still scared it's going to break and it will be on them. Maybe one reason is because if you break an Excel doc, there's usually someone around in your org who knows how to fix it. But the same can't be said for some random new hot nocode tool. I think for specific use cases, yes. But for general, web and mobile apps, I just think it is too much complexity you can't simplify away, or at least none of the box-dragging UIs seem to have achieved that. I agree this can be a big market, but a shift is needed to make it actually easy, not "look how easy it is" easy. Taking a different tac, maybe there's just not a market for it. The browser/HTML/JS is everywhere. It's not that hard to build a simple tool or app, but people in orgs use Excel, they don't build a simple page, even. It's not because they couldn't learn how, but somehow that just now what people in orgs do. I don't know why. |
The nice thing about this model is that it implies there's a bar to be a Maker and other users can't break your work. You need to be able to reason about concepts like DRY, star schema, cardinality, etc. As a Maker in my org (15-30K people depending on where we are with the pandemic) I can support many no-code apps painlessly in addition to my primary responsibilities, whereas one CRUD app on Heroku had me feeling spread pretty thin.