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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

> I still can't imagine going to the trouble of actually doing all of that if I can just log into HoneyComb and make everything nice and quick and just get it done.

That sounds all nice and good until one inevitably runs into limitations of the software. And then it has to be made again, this time from scratch.

> bashing it together with Django and deploying it to an EC2 VM is almost definitely not your differentiated value proposition

It never -was- the value proposition. Customers simply do not care about what stack you used in the first place. They will care when features don't get rolled out because of limitations. Or when bugs arise because developers duct-taped solutions together because of the limitations of their software-making software. Not that traditional apps are perfect, but that's one issue they don't have.

Yes, it is complicated, and if you're making a toy app it probably will suffice. But I would never rely on it for a business.

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> But I would never rely on it for a business.

You sir have options. Every place I have ever worked has at least one app that someone hacked together through some combination of PDFs, Excel and Access. This is a tremendous opportunity for those folks. The ones who will never learn to code, never learn to deploy an application and never get enough visibility to have a developer assigned to their project.

For the everyteam, these types of tools are exceptional. I continue to be amazed by what dedicated people pull-off with these no-code solutions.

> Every place I have ever worked has at least one app that someone hacked together through some combination of PDFs, Excel and Access... I continue to be amazed by what dedicated people pull-off with these no-code solutions.

VBA, SQL, etc, which is probably what these apps are written with, are code though.

Honeycode is a language of it's own too, it's just a trade off between flexibility/power and learning curve.

I should have been more explicit, the things are built in Excel and Access with the front-end interfaces not VBA or SQL.

Agreed. When I was a teenager a worked at an organization whose entire business was run on internal applications built out in FileMaker Pro largely by non-programmer teenagers and young adults. It was actually pretty awesome, and I was still able to drop into a basic scripting language on the few occasions I needed to implement some non-trivial logic.

I think it’s amazing people build a whole complex web of formulas and conditions, and then try to claim they didn’t use any code.

Why wouldn't you? People have used excel scripting for real business tools for decades.

I fail to see how Honeycode outright disqualifies for everything related to vast field of "business" because of its limitations. In fact, I think that is very much, where it will be able to solve a lot of problems efficiently.

All of them? No, just like any other tool. They all come with their set of drawbacks.

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