Re:Low Code Software Development Is a Lie
by wruza on Saturday April 15, 2023 @01:39PM
(#35582724)
also going all the way back to the original low code tool itself, spreadsheets. People really can build huge things with them. But after a certain degree of size and complexity, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to go with low code tools.
The problem with spreadsheets is that they end up with 5 lines of formula code wrapping over a fullhd+ screen. If it was a regular code, which isn’t hard to write at all, they could grow much further and get help from professional developers. When I see that 5-line formula, I say “sorry, you have to figure it out by yourself”.
What low-code should actually be is what we called RAD back in the day. Excel is a good idiom and a platform for doing things. But its language actually sucks. What regular people are afraid of is boilerplate and wheel-engineering, not code itself. I disagree with the second paragraph. Most of our “starter” complexity is highly incidental, in a sense that we always start in a forest, cold and naked.
The problem with spreadsheets is that they end up with 5 lines of formula code wrapping over a fullhd+ screen. If it was a regular code, which isn’t hard to write at all, they could grow much further and get help from professional developers. When I see that 5-line formula, I say “sorry, you have to figure it out by yourself”.
What low-code should actually be is what we called RAD back in the day. Excel is a good idiom and a platform for doing things. But its language actually sucks. What regular people are afraid of is boilerplate and wheel-engineering, not code itself. I disagree with the second paragraph. Most of our “starter” complexity is highly incidental, in a sense that we always start in a forest, cold and naked.