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Re:Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the ... by bitwize on Saturday August 22, 2020 @07:41PM (#24248210)
No code/low code is snake oil that gets sold to us every few years, and always fails to take hold. The reason why is because by the time you get the GUI widgets, hand gestures, whistled tones, or whatever in your low-code solution specific enough to be interpretable by computer, what you've come up with is isomorphic to constructs in some programming language. (And don't say "But AI will solve this problem!": anything intelligent enough to turn vague requirements into working programs outside very well specified constraints is intelligent enough to demand compensation negotiations for continued output.)

So you really haven't made the code go away; you've disguised it as something that isn't code. This actually works well for tricking people into programming when they otherwise wouldn't. And this itself is a viable strategy: consider the secretaries in the 1970s who used Lisp to "customize" Multics Emacs and were never told they were programming it. But it doesn't eliminate the complexity of coding. And most "no-code/low-code" platforms have disadvantages (vendor lock, extremely limited applicability, zero portability) that are almost guaranteed to bite you in the ass later.

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