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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

I can teach IF, FOR, and the basics of python in a week. I can teach ruby in about the same. For what they are going to need for a low code solution, that's enough. You don't need to teach all of programming - only a subset that would be covered in a low/no code solution.

If you don't believe this, look at how many non-CS professionals have learned VBA as their excel-fu reached a limit. Even if it's not clean to start, the natural human curiosity starts to take over.

One of the better programmers I ever knew had a high school education and was working in an airplane maintenance facility when he was frustrated with the tools he had and just started learning VBA on his own.

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I think you might be underestimating what these tools can do. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have also seen a junior marketing person create a Web form to be sent to clients (using Jotform or similar), have it output to a Google sheet, have Zapier pick it up and move it to Airtable, where he defined a bunch of extra fields for internal staff to annotate the submissions, all while getting notifications when certain conditions were met.

Not only could he not learn enough python in a week to do this, but the professional developers on my team could not do this in a week.

This actually feels very unixish. `form | sheet; crontab: zapier | airtable`. Simple tools that can be simply combined - I feel similar about Tasker, where I can combine various building blocks without worrying about compiling an app. (It does get cumbersome without an IDE)

> I can teach IF, FOR, and the basics of python in a week. I can teach ruby in about the same. For what they are going to need for a low code solution, that's enough. You don't need to teach all of programming - only a subset that would be covered in a low/no code solution.

OK, now what? Do you teach them deployment of those "low code solutions"? Is it another week?

"Oh, now you want to send a notification to Slack? That's a little above basics. What about another week of learning the concept of libraries?"

Do you see the pattern?

Doesn't matter if teaching fundamentals only takes "a week" -- that can't be afforded when you need a tool right now.

While true, that's a big failure of business - fix the pipeline before the fire, no?

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