Can you elaborate on the list of problems with no-code? Of course I'm not denying there are problems with no-code, I'd like to learn about other developers' issues, particularly with larger, longer-term projects.
No-code eventually becomes so complex that it becomes a bad programming language eventually, or lacks the expressiveness of a programming language to do what the business wants.
The imagined problem no-code addresses is business people thinking that their requirements are simple, and the source of their problems are expensive software developers and programming languages. Just get a junior business analyst to drag some boxes around, and job done. They are wrong.
I think there's an interesting analogy to be drawn with Lego. You can build interesting and useful things out of Lego, more than you may even realize. It can be fast & effective, it's certainly easy, especially if you imagine we've abstracted away the question of what bricks you have so you have as many as you need of any kind & color.
However, you end up with two sorts of problems if you start letting people just build solutions to whatever they like with Lego:
1. The solutions may work, but they aren't really that good. You can only do what there's Lego bricks for. When it comes time to solve the problem at the next level, the Lego stuff can be less helpful than it looks even as a prototype, as even at small scales a lot of the engineering in the Lego was solving around the limitations of Lego in the first place, rather than solving the problem per se.
2. Eventually you get people trying to build sheds and houses out of legos, struggling to put up shelves, all kinds of silly things that the solution isn't really suitable for. And there's a variety of pathologies here, too, like how they don't understand why their Lego solution isn't good enough, and why you can't just buff up their shelf since it's just that the shelf is falling over, and explaining to them that they basically just built a shed that is made out of code violations may not be very easy, etc.
There are advantages, too, like letting them get their hands on some engineering and stuff, and there are a lot of problems in the world where a Lego solution is no big deal. I don't know if I've got anything right now, but I've done it before; I had a lego setup for holding tablets & phones for charging that was better than anything I've bought, because it actually had the correct sizes for things, for instance. But there's limits.
And at that point all of that no-code turns from an accelerator into a giant pile of legacy crap outside of your control which will cause you to hit a wall of ability to evolve the software far sooner than later.
most obvious would be you are building your business on rented land and could be deplatformed at any time plus strong armed into extreme markup prices with no leverage against the platform.
The other issue is that it seems doubtful the product could scale beyond a certain level in terms of traffic and also employees collaborating to add features
a_humean|4 years ago
The imagined problem no-code addresses is business people thinking that their requirements are simple, and the source of their problems are expensive software developers and programming languages. Just get a junior business analyst to drag some boxes around, and job done. They are wrong.
This pattern has been repeated for decades now.
jerf|4 years ago
However, you end up with two sorts of problems if you start letting people just build solutions to whatever they like with Lego:
1. The solutions may work, but they aren't really that good. You can only do what there's Lego bricks for. When it comes time to solve the problem at the next level, the Lego stuff can be less helpful than it looks even as a prototype, as even at small scales a lot of the engineering in the Lego was solving around the limitations of Lego in the first place, rather than solving the problem per se.
2. Eventually you get people trying to build sheds and houses out of legos, struggling to put up shelves, all kinds of silly things that the solution isn't really suitable for. And there's a variety of pathologies here, too, like how they don't understand why their Lego solution isn't good enough, and why you can't just buff up their shelf since it's just that the shelf is falling over, and explaining to them that they basically just built a shed that is made out of code violations may not be very easy, etc.
There are advantages, too, like letting them get their hands on some engineering and stuff, and there are a lot of problems in the world where a Lego solution is no big deal. I don't know if I've got anything right now, but I've done it before; I had a lego setup for holding tablets & phones for charging that was better than anything I've bought, because it actually had the correct sizes for things, for instance. But there's limits.
codegeek|4 years ago
blacktriangle|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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foxbee|4 years ago
Access to the code base - it's hard to build on top of, or around the platform
Long-term viability - if i build my company on top of your product, how can I be sure you'll always be around?
For transparency, I am the cofounder of Budibase: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
ren_engineer|4 years ago
The other issue is that it seems doubtful the product could scale beyond a certain level in terms of traffic and also employees collaborating to add features
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]