To write code is much like to instructing a person who is doing work-to-rule. That person won't do anything outside of instructions given and will stop at the very first time it can (encounter an error).

If you can cope with instructing work-to-rule workers, you can code. No extraordinary smarts required.

As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above average" as +15 points (IQ's standard deviation) and "much smarter" as another +30 points, we end at 160 IQ points person. Four standard deviations make that person one in roughly 16 000, or sixteen thousands. I think you should know a lot of people, much more than 150 or so of average person, to know many of them.

And to offer you my experience, my brother seems not to have any problems with coding in Python. He is well into 40-s, most of his career he was at the C*O positions and right now he decided to change venues one more time.

> As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above average" as +15 points (IQ's standard deviation) and "much smarter" as another +30 points, we end at 160 IQ points person. Four standard deviations make that person one in roughly 16 000, or sixteen thousands. I think you should know a lot of people, much more than 150 or so of average person, to know many of them.

Nice example that if you define the terms to suit your argument then you can make any argument. Also, the word 'smart' has much wider scope than just IQ. It is also possible that the people OP knows are not sampled randomly from general population (he might be in a chess club for example).

I'm happy that these no-code/less-code/visual programming tools are putting the web-apps in focus again, It's changing from 'I have an idea, I need to find an mobile app developer' to 'I have an idea, I can create a prototype on web myself'.

Personally as a coder I have workflows, tool-chains developed over several years that writing a code to create a MVP is faster than learning no-code tools, also the end product is lean and stays with me.

So I haven't used these tools but tried notion for the first time yesterday to export my kindle highlights(HN comments)[1], So I can see the value in these no-code tools in automation workflows for even coders.

[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/14199150634906050...

> who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck

Sounds to me like a generally applicable thing to be honest. Even as a programmer I can't just pick up my favorite language and use it for any type of software. There is mature/user-friendly infrastructure and libraries for X/Y targeting Z, for a limited set of permutations.

Totally. I use this analogy where if photoshop did not have this low-code interface and all artists have to do was program strokes code by code, how many artists who couldn't learn or understand "coding" would be left out?

IMO Bubble is only ms-paint+ (entry point lowcode) and Photoshop (or Figma) is yet to hit the market.

Does Photoshop let anyone become a useful designer?

I'd argue, no.

Bubble will not provide good handmade applications in the vast majority of cases.

well, Bubble can simply add more features to become the equivalent of Photoshop for web design...

...And then we'll have Squarespace.

Squarespace, Illustrator, Photoshop, Maya, After effects - whatever - its a different way to think about exposing the interface - they all have algorithms under the hood, but they wont expose it in the same language (of difficulty) as the algorithms - have a visual interface on top of it. Why can't web developers be treated as people who need high level components? (, databases, APIs, file systems, queues)

I know excellent mathematicians who cannot code. The guy can solve Math Olympiad problems and puzzles but he despises coding. Old school chalk/board or pencil/paper for him all the way.

Are they not able to learn to code though, or is it simply a matter of comfort and preference?

A professor I know solves the quantum mechanical equations of metabolites to predict their MR spectrum to optimize their pulse sequence, and then does it directly on patients.

His QC simulation code in matlab would write the output of each iteration to a file because he didn’t optimize the object sizes. A simulation that should take an hour now takes 20 lol. It’s probably like in the Sherlock show how Holmes says he doesn’t want to waste neurons memorizing constellations.

Absolutely. It can't be said enough how much of a bubble there is here. Smart entrepreneurs who know how to get shit done don't want to waste their time learning a bunch of rote arcane commands to reify their vision. That said, these kinds of no-code panics happen twice a year around here, and looking back long enough, they're never more than a niche product. We'll see about this one.

I like to consider myself one of those people. I find the hosting/infrastructure side much more of an obstacle/hassle than the code. Getting the infrastructure out of the way and letting me write business logic and tools is what I'm most interested in.

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

I've watched life science people spend months manually clicking boxes in the tools they have, because they don't have a developer embedded in the team to write some 10-liner automation scripts. Same with stats, there are all kinds of systems like GraphPad Prism which try to bridge Excel and 'real' stats, where 30 lines of python and a CSV file would save them months.

More, they weren't even aware that these things could be improved. So no, I'm not convinced life science is intrinsically harder or the people there smarter. I attended some biochem and genetics classes at uni and once you have the foundations the concepts are actually pretty simple, there's just a lot of new terminology and random facts to memorize.

Agreed to some extent. "Life science" is quite broad so there's a wide range of topics with varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. I dipped my toes in various apects of life science during a biomedical engineering major. There are specialties overlapping with most traditional fields; from specialties comprising a large part of memorization like physiology, tissue engineering, and biochemistry (medicine), to hardcore organic synthesis (organic chem.), biomechanics (mechanical eng.), systems biology (control and graph theory), biosensors (physics, chem, biochem), imaging (CS::ML & physics), protein engineering/polymer science (chem, phys), bioinformatics (CS) which got me into CS/SE and programming, and many more.

Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.

You think every single person in life sciences is smarter than every single developer?

Let me guess, you are one of the brilliant ones.

I've met some dim people in science research tracks.

If they are really that much smarter, why don't they code their own tools? It's not like there's a programming guild which enforces the monopoly held by certified software developers.

Hopefully one day...

I was once hired to do exactly that - develop real software to replace the weird hacks those life science folk built by themselves. Boy were they happy after that. So I guess your mileage will vary by lots.

IME the stronger labs have accepted the fact that software skills are key to their work, and embraced python, jupyter etc.

You should see the code they (we) write. Atrocious, archaic, sphagetti, words fail me.

Our microscope acquisition code is a single 25k LOC C file.

> In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel.

That's not really proving your point about them being "smarter than any developer". Lots of developers are smart enough to build their own tools.

"Software is IT captured"? What does that mean? You can have Python running and be creating software in an hour.

Life sciences people are generally far less intelligent than the average developer lol

I was a LS PhD, now I’m a developer. I can assure you that the average developer is far inferior to most PhD or post docs in any reputable university. Doesn’t mean they are absolutely smart though, I’d argue the biggest issue in research today is that there are a lot of not-that-smart-hustlers in it compared to what researhers used to be 60-100 years back.