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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

No No No

There is such a thing as software literacy just as there is a thing called literacy. We spend the first 15-20 years of life teaching literacy so that a young person will be productive in life.

What makes us think it's going to be different with software?

The idea of low-code is like the idea of writing a novel by cut and pasting loads of blank comic book panels carefully crafted by Marvel Studios.

This job used to be called Analyst-Programmer - and nothing in low code will stop the analyst part from being needed. As for the programmer part, it is way way easier to express yourself in code once you can code than any of these blocky tools.

Yes we desperately need new and better tools and languages and processes and so on. But not dumbing down - skilling up

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Fully agreed.

A former employer once decided to empower non-technical users to design their own integrations using zapier. It was fine until someone wrote an action that changed a cell on a spreadsheet, which triggered another action that, itself, triggered the original action. A more software literate user would likely have noticed the infinite loop. That was not a fun week.

And anyway, this specific case was all to keep two calendars in sync, for which there are simpler and more reliable solutions. Even this awareness, of knowing when to look for something instead of making it yourself, is part of software literacy.

It also strikes me that the hyperfocus on UX that we've seen in the past, say, 20 years, has systematically removed users' ability to gain software literacy the way it was mostly done in the past: by tinkering. Current young users are mostly clueless about the workings of their apps, since their attention is so well held by apps' prescribed interactions.

Agreed - I mean I grew up on a couple of Sinclair's. You literally started in a command line. You needed to load up the distracting game from tape. Magazines had print outs to type in (that was less cool but at least you had he point)

Damn I need to start those coding clubs with my kids ... it's like growing up in a chefs house who just orders take out cos he is too tired after a days work. poor kids

Even the tired chef can still raise their kids with a healthy respect for food and cooking. By all means, order takeout every night if you can afford it, but take that as an opportunity for thoughtful critique: "maybe this meal was too salty because it was counterbalancing the sweetness of the sauce, or maybe the meat was rank and so it was oversalted".

Don't beat yourself up :)

Just be thoughtful and expressive with your kids, and they'll find their own way around software. Just like you did ;)

First off, disclaimer, co-founder of Lowdefy [0] and shameless plug. But feel ok since it is on topic.

I 100% agree with you on this. We’ve built many back-office tools for customers and the bulk of the engineering time goes into understanding the problem and tranlating that into data. Tools like Lowdefy make it a lot easier to put this translation into action, but the real work is done by a data literate employee.

We believe that role will stay with it the IT / dev department, at least for any project / tool larger than a Airtable. It use to be all tools larger than a spreadsheet or access DB, but now that scale has increased slightly but not much.

For this reason we are designing Lowdefy to be a dev first low-code platform. By writing apps in a DSL you get the following advantages:

- No steep learning curve for new devs :: All devs are familiar with DSLs. - Apps follow a structured schema :: Easy to pick up where others left off. - Nothing is hidden in a GUI :: You can copy, paste, find, replace, review changes, duplicate repos, etc. - Create and manage apps with code :: Develop scripts, like a visual app builder. - DSL files work with all dev tools :: Devs want to use their favorite tools.

[0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

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With all this said, you can optimize with tools as much as you like - most dev productivity is always lost in building the wrong things.

Ok - piqued interest, the DSL sounds interesting and I tried the demo. Wish you all the best

Low-Def-ee or Loader-fi

Thanks :) It's Low-de-fi

A lot of the developers these days tend to be integrators. The no-code tooling can help actually take that procedure to a higher abstraction where understanding of the system would still be needed but understanding of the low level details of coding can be completely eliminated.

Think languages like JS or PHP. World have been built using these and many of the developers in these languages don’t have understanding on how computers actually work. People can built money making code with these without learning about data types. Both are regarded as low quality languages but both are extremely productive.

Also, many people who don’t know any computer languages are programming in MS Excel all the time.

Sometimes, some tools are simply extremely productive and intuitive when the mental model of the domain you are solving problems matches the way these tools work.

You don’t need to know “how computers actually work” to write code in high-level languages. Those are too abstracted away from the hardware and OS.

PHP and JS are not considered low-quality languages. They are low-hanging fruit for amateurs to write low-quality software. Yes, people who don’t really know what they’re doing can make money with PHP and JS, just like people who don’t know about food, cooking, nutrition can run a restaurant. That’s not really a good argument for low-code, though.

JS and PHP are often a joke due to their inconsistencies.

Anyway, these are also low-code languages. They are not low hanging fruits because of the syntax or the features but because of the API and boilerplate geared towards specific domain. These almost get out of the way of the people who are not fascinated by the technology itself but by the product they are building.

It’s so easy to use JS and PHP to solve a problem.

For PHP, you simply wrote your code and put in a folder in a LAMP machine and it works.

JS is even easier, you open the developer tools in your favorite browser and there you have it. Instantly start working on your idea.

I’m not unfamiliar with PHP and JS. Those account for about 90% of my work, and have for over a decade.

Every language has its inconsistencies. No question PHP and JS have their faults. That’s what happens when a language gets popular (i.e. actually used rather than just argued about in programmer forums) and the deployed code base grows faster than the developers can “fix” the language. Back-compatibility then imposes real constraints. This happened with C, C++, and SQL too, and every language people actually use to write code with any value. The only joke is smug programmers not getting that we can’t go back in time and fix problems obvious in hindsight unless we’re writing class assignments or hobby projects in Haskell.

I make a good living maintaining and rewriting the first drafts of PHP and JS code written by people who let a bit too much get out of their way. Usually they run into problems of scale, security, maintainability.

If you think deploying a real app that has business value amounts to dropping some PHP files in a folder you should keep my email for when that doesn’t work out. I hope the ransomware hackers don’t find your code first.

I don’t see why you are offended. I love JS but here it is 20min of programming jokes in the expense of JS: https://youtu.be/et8xNAc2ic8

As it comes to PHP, I don’t say that you can do everything by a single PHP file in a web server folder(actually, you can but not comfortably). I’m trying to illustrate it’s low-code nature.

There are no other languages that are that easy to start solving your problem with. Okay, maybe Python.

The newer no-code or low-code tools have the same spirit. They are abstraction layers targeting a domain.

These days there’s plenty you can do by programming visually without any knowledge of programming languages. Not everything needs to scale for throughput.

I’m not offended, I have no investment in those languages, or any language. I just don’t agree.

PHP is easy for beginners because of the tooling, or lack of. As you wrote you can just put PHP files in the right folder and there’s your “Hello, world” web page. The language itself is no less capable and sophisticated than any other C-family language, and PHP’s huge (and inconsistent) standard library goes a long way. But getting a demo or tutorial page up is not software development. You have to write actual code to make even a simple CRUD app, plus understand something about databases. It’s not low code.

You can maybe learn JS in the browser console but that’s not developing anything useful. To run JS on the server you need node and npm and the skills to get that all working. Not low code either.

These are low bar to entry languages/ecosystems but they are not low code/no code solutions.

still, the sheer number of ready made sandboxes certainly will expand such that niche software implementations will be far and fewer.

of course, like moores law, its likely not going to engulf everywhere a programmer touches, so new use cases will keep busy.

but take wordpress, you can basicslly build a whole ecommerce site knowing a couple of plugins real well.

Well said.

> But not dumbing down - skilling up

But, you cannot have Wall Street consolidated market winners if you do that! How dare you!

I saw this first hand growing up. The school system had a couple of programming courses a few years before I got into the high school, and then it got all new computers and magically reduced computer education to only a set of Microsoft Office courses offered.

Who needs programming? The school knew we would all only need Word and Excel at any "office job" we could possibly ever get ...

So much this. I was in that beautiful space where schools experimented with CNA and A+ cert programs that set me in the generalized basics of how to escape from proprietary stacks.

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