"That looks too much like real programming!""Well, it's not quite rocket science!"
These are two of my favorite quotes from ex-colleagues.
The first quote above is from over 25 years ago, when I was working at a software company called Omnis. It had developed the first cross-platform (Mac and Windows) software development tool. The tool included a visual builder, a proprietary database, and connectivity to all other contemporary relational databases, most notably Oracle. My colleague offered this observation when asked why not use Java (which had recently been released) instead of the Omnis tool.
The second quote above is from 4 years ago, when I was working at another software company that provided an eCommerce platform. My colleague offered his response when I asked him how easy it was to build custom solutions with the platform. He then proceeded to talk about actual rocket science and his Master's degree in Aeronautics from Purdue!
While my colleagues' responses were clearly tongue-in-cheek, they each highlight the tendency that we, in technology, are inclined to overcomplicate things. The fact that there was over 20 years between those remarks, suggests that, perhaps, not so much has changed. Most, if not all, business-facing problems on which I have worked over my long career, did not need real programming or anything like rocket science.
Which brings us to the burgeoning low-code/no-code movement. These contemporary tools provide another layer of abstraction on top of "real programming" and aim to democratize software development. They do this by offering visual development interfaces that eliminate or reduce the need to code and understand complex programming syntax and concepts, replacing it with familiar drag-and-drop gestures and simple property assignments.
The fact that technology heavyweights Amazon (Honeycode), Apple (SwiftUI), Google (AppSheet), Microsoft (Power Apps), Oracle (Apex), SAP (AppGyver), and Salesforce (Lightning) all have skin in the low-code/no-code game, suggest that we have reached an inflection point.
No longer does every application need to be viewed through the lens of the corporate Information Technology department and the all-knowing high-priesthood of software architects and programmers!
As such, perhaps we can think of these low-code/no-code tools as very distant relatives of COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). As its expanded name suggests, COBOL was/is more oriented towards "business users" than "engineers". Don't be fooled, though, it still sports a fairly arcane vocabulary and syntax.
Over my long career in software development, I have always been struck by this industry paradox -- our mission is to encourage productivity and yet our choice of tools and process are often inefficient (for the job at hand). In addition to implementing solutions in more traditional languages such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, PL/SQL and shell scripting, I have dabbled in the following tools that aimed to smooth away some of those rough edges and inefficiencies, and could, therefore, be considered predecessors to today's low-code/no-code generation of tools:
"Real programming" (and real programmers) will always be needed, of course. Someone has to understand concepts such as pointers, memory buffers, static versus dynamic typing, polymorphism, object orientation, functional programming, instruction sets, data types, registers, and memory management. However, that is not (and should not) be a requirement for most of the business automation that is being developed right now.
I have always looked for ways to simplify business software development within my teams, either through improved tooling, process, management, or culture. In my next blog post, I will take a deep dive and test drive the following low-code/no-code tools*:
Stay tuned for my next post to find out which tool will make me the best citizen developer.
*This subset of the vast (and rapidly evolving) low-code/no-code market, focuses on general-purpose app development in the Google ecosystem. This is the area that I'm currently most familiar with. I plan to later create deep dive posts into more specialized low-code/no-code tools focused on AI/ML, web design, eCommerce builders, and business process automation (BPA).
