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Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by altdatathrow on Sunday October 04, 2020 @06:31PM (#24682777)
Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by sushshshsh on Sunday October 04, 2020 @07:04PM (#24682955)
HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs...

Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop.

What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software.

When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?)

If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by jimbokun on Sunday October 04, 2020 @11:03PM (#24684186)
What if the robots decide they have different priorities?
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by jimbokun on Sunday October 04, 2020 @11:06PM (#24684197)
I've lost count of how many "no-code" movements we've had since computers were invented.

The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example.

But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by lmm on Sunday October 04, 2020 @11:03PM (#24684180)
Heh, from where I stand "the no-code movement" and "the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them" are much the same thing. What the industry needs is the boring grunt work of replacing frameworks with libraries. Rather than generating a 55-file "project skeleton", we should be able to call standard libraries written in plain old code and get the same behaviour, adding the extra stuff as and when we need it.

Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code.

But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by Izkata on Monday October 05, 2020 @12:30AM (#24684569)
> Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing?

This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by lmm on Monday October 05, 2020 @01:10AM (#24684720)
Django is very much like Rails with the same upsides and downsides - it's easy to get started, but hard to maintain and upgrade, partly because of not having a type system. So companies making things for long-term internal use tend to prefer these Java frameworks, because while it's horribly cumbersome to get started with them, you can be pretty confident that upgrades will be safe because they put a lot of effort into backward compatibility.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by disqard on Monday October 05, 2020 @04:40AM (#24685753)
Strongly agree about the difficulty of maintaining a Django project due to its lack of type system -- though tbf, it's imposed by Python, the underlying language.

And, one can annotate Python3 to make it typed, so things might improve.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by _glass on Monday October 05, 2020 @05:24AM (#24685962)
actually we have. it's called standard software. in sap and salesforce, you have the standard that fulfils what you describe, and just customize the rest.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by lmm on Monday October 05, 2020 @06:32AM (#24686339)
Those cases are notorious for ending up with "configuration" that's more complicated and harder to maintain than an actual program would be.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by spdionis on Monday October 05, 2020 @07:44AM (#24686740)
That's exactly the point :)

This is why no-code solutions have never become popular.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by apta on Sunday October 04, 2020 @07:59PM (#24683242)
Except that there's absolutely no evidence that the so called "no-code" movement will achieve anything beyond what we already have today.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by altdatathrow on Sunday October 04, 2020 @09:06PM (#24683639)
Definitely. But I don’t see the point of paying someone $200k to write a simple web app, even if it’s using react and kubernetes. VC has killed innovation and instead created a cyclical bullshit engine.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by Existenceblinks on Sunday October 04, 2020 @09:36PM (#24683791)
It's not only because VC sort of manipulating software labour values although it's their nature of so called "investment", it's also software developer communities. If you are around those slack channels, forums long enough you start to see there are very few discussion of developing anything real or valuable. Most of them spend time just "playing" technology/tools.

It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by apta on Monday October 05, 2020 @11:24AM (#24688562)
You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground. And "simple" is relative, every customer is going to need a customized app.

This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by altdatathrow on Monday October 05, 2020 @12:42PM (#24689365)
> You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground

This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.

Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by IdiocyInAction on Monday October 05, 2020 @12:10PM (#24689022)
Then don't. If you can do it without the 200k, then you have a market niche you can exploit and make lots of money that way. Lead the way.
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by someguydave on Sunday October 04, 2020 @09:03PM (#24683629)
and “no-code” will be used to hype bullshit research and scam products
Re:Why I left my tenured academic job by collyw on Monday October 05, 2020 @12:48PM (#24689445)
"Code" isn't the difficult part. (OK, it is initially when you are learning, but not in the real world).