[jillesvangurp]

Low code efforts go back decades. In the eighties there was this whole movement around 4GL languages. Basically relatively simple languages around databases that enabled relatively quick development of business applications. Before that, Cobol of course was an attempt to come up with a business programming language that was nominally human readable. In the nineties we got things like Visual Basic, Delphi and a bunch of other things which again were targeting relatively inexperienced programmers. And then of course there's a long history of creating domain specific languages for all sorts of things - typically with the goal to let domain experts be able to define things. Tcl/TK is a good example for UI applications on X-windows.

Rails built on all of that. Ruby brought two useful thing to the table (well, borrowed from Lisp) which was meta programming and the ability to use its syntax to build so-called internal DSLs: domain specific languages which were just building on top of Ruby's own syntax instead of needing a new one. Rails is basically a DSL for building web based database applications with server side model view controller style UIs.

Once MVC moved mostly client side with single page javascript applications and rich mobile applications, the MVC bits and bobs became somewhat redundant. And of course the rest of it is basically a nice but otherwise unremarkable ORM framework that you can find for other languages as well. I was never that impressed with it to be honest and I'm not a big fan or ORM frameworks in general. Server side MVC is still somewhat relevant if you are into server side rendering (which reinvents what world + dog was doing twenty years ago) but otherwise not that relevant for most REST APIs.

IMHO the last two decades have been a bit unremarkable for UI development. It seems a lot of things plateaued in the nineties. The average UI projects are still fairly labor intensive for what they do; which is mostly just building a lot of form based crap to input data in some database. We had perfectly usable and relatively idiot proof visual UI builders that did that sort of thing thirty years ago. From a functional point of view, the resulting UIs more or less did the same thing. Was that great code, not necessarily. But it did the job. And most "modern" react/rails/django/whatever code isn't a whole lot better. If you discard the lipstick on a pig that is CSS, you are left with essentially the same UI components and primitives (buttons, checkboxes, text fields, etc.). We had all of those decades ago. You don't need a mustache twirling hipster web ninja to reinvent those wheels.