| In my experience, Low Code tries to fix the non-problem and makes the real problem worse. They will get you up to speed fast, but with a much lower output plateau than normal programming tools. Some experience from one low code tool I used this year: Non-problem: Writing code. This is the easy part. COBOL took typists, gave them a week of courses, which made them successful basic coders. Low code helps the most basic junior but slows down the average coder by forcing everything trough drag and drop. Problem: Reading code. Most low code platforms I've seen show you only a small part of the code, needing a lot of clicking around in a GUI to make sure you found it all.
It either transform it in a mess of arrows and boxes or spread it out so wide you spend more time scrolling than reading. I've found myself reading the XML dumps of our current tool just to spare me some time. Problem: One size fits all. You can't polish or finetune the standard components. What you see is what you get. This guarantees you both a minimum and a maximum level of quality. Yes, there are escape hatches. No, they won't help you. You will make parts of your program unstable or less user friendly because your low-code vendor didn't foresee all of your needs. Problem: Versioning. Boxes and arrows don't merge well. There is generally only a small team working on 1 piece of code. You can't scale it past 3-4 people. Also, emergency fixes in prod don't easily propagate back to dev, especially in a high-stress situations. You'll have to do it manually. This almost guarantees regression bugs. Problem: Searching code. If you have enough code, the day comes where you'll need to find all references to something. I've grepped code bases of >10 000 000 lines. Can't do it in more than the most limited way with low code. Problem: knowledge exchange. Something like stack exchange works because you can type text. Print screen is the only option available in most low code tools. As the saying goes, the core of ICT is not programming but Information and Communication. If you want to make programmers obsolete, you need tools that help you organize information and ease communication. Low code is simply the wrong way to look at the problem. it ends up throwing tons of man-hours at a problem. In the long term, it creates more programmer jobs, not less. |