[AnimalMuppet]

I notice, though, that your examples are not from programming at all. Your examples are about users of devices. True, programmers use languages, but programming is far more complicated than using a music service.

Something like "no code" may make programming easier... until it doesn't. That is, you get to the point where either you can't do what you need to do, or where it would be easier to do it by just writing the code. If the "no code" approach lets you write significant parts of your program that way, it may still be a net win, but it's not the way we're going to do all of programming in the future.

[EricE]

"I notice, though, that your examples are not from programming at all. Your examples are about users of devices. "

Just to level set - as a program manager when I engage with programmers it's not because I want to buy programmers.

I want the fruits of their labors.

Let me put it another way - programmers love to bemoan the way users abuse Excel. Users abuse Excel because it meets their needs best, given all other factors in their environments.

If things like no code environments progress where they can provide at a minimum the level of functionality Excel can for many tasks then it will take off. No, it won't be "all of programming" but enough to be a paradigm shif?

You betcha.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, take Excel. It provided a way for a lot of non-programmers, who didn't want to become programmers, to program enough to get their work done. And that's great!

But if you look at a graph of the number of people employed as programmers, and you look for the point where that number started to decline because Excel made them unnecessary, well, you don't find it. Excel made simpler stuff available for simpler problems, but it didn't address bigger problems, and there were plenty of bigger problems to go around.

And when we talk about fundamentally improving programming, we aren't talking about improving it for those trying to solve Excel-level problems. (That's still worth doing! It's just not what we're talking about.)

So if you can create a new Excel for some area, it will take off. And that's great, for the people who can use it. It won't be all of programming, but it will be a paradigm shift for those who use it.

Will that be a paradigm shift for all of programming? Depends on how many people use it. My bet would be that there is no Excel-like shift (or no-code shift) in, say, the next 20 years, that will affect even 30% of what we currently recognize as programmers.

(If you introduce a great no-code thing, and 10% of current programmers shift to use it, and a ton of newcomers join them, that still only counts as 10% by my metric, in the same way that we don't really count Excel jockeys as professional programmers.)

[izuchukwu]

Generational leaps emerge in the same ways everywhere.

For any space, if you provide a large enough net win for a large enough number of people, you introduce a generational leap. Very often, those people are completely new to the space.

The measure here isn’t how many growing companies that started with no-code adopt code as they grow. The measure here is how many growing companies that started with no-code wouldn’t have been started otherwise.