[HN Gopher] No code is a lie (2019)
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No code is a lie (2019)
Author : tosh
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-02-14 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webflow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (webflow.com)
| bmgxyz wrote:
| When I started my last job, I thought I was going to be writing a
| lot of Python and C. It turned out that the position had a lot
| more React and TypeScript than I expected, and at first I was
| annoyed and afraid. I wasn't a frontend developer---or worse, a
| _designer_ ---but I didn't have much of a choice, so I dug in and
| learned the stack.
|
| At first I resisted every change. What good is VS Code when I
| have Vim? Why would I learn TypeScript when vanilla JS has
| "worked" for me for so long? _What 's a Webpack config?_
|
| Once I began using the tools that my coworkers recommended, I
| started treading water and even swimming with purpose in the
| ocean of Web UI technology. I still have a lot to learn, but I
| probably would have kept on avoiding this area if my situation
| hadn't forced me into it. Letting my guard down and following the
| trends in my group helped a lot in this case.
|
| The best lessons I learned during that period are that learning
| can't kill me and using good tools doesn't make you a bad
| engineer.
| j-pb wrote:
| I'm glad that you had such a positive experience! After years
| of web development I'm just burnt out by the tooling.
|
| Layers upon layers, just make debugging so unnecessarily hard.
| The tooling is brittle and buggy.
|
| I've seen typescript compiler bugs, webpack segfaults, and
| whatnot. I've started to ban typescript and jsx from all future
| projects, and it's better, but still a nightmare.
| jspash wrote:
| I'm on the fence but painfully with both feet on the ground.
| However it wouldn't take stiff wind to knock me back on to
| the plain ol JS side.
|
| I'm currently "rewriting" a vue.js app for the sole reason
| that we've just lost a senior dev who was the only one who
| could stomach the thing. We've taken on two juniors in his
| place and there is absolutely no way they would be able to
| dig into this thing.
|
| The process has been quite enjoyable and we're just about at
| feature parity at 1/10 LOC. And the juniors are quite keen at
| picking up typescript and lots of other useful things along
| the way.
|
| Had they just been dumped into the vue pool, things would
| have turned out much differently.
|
| I await the day a few months from now when they "discover"
| this new thing called vue and want to rewrite the entire
| thing!
| Xevi wrote:
| As a mainly frontend developer, I agree. I've spent more time
| configuring tooling, than writing code, in this new project
| I'm starting. I don't want to write plain JS, but the top
| used frameworks have strayed so far from basic JS that it's
| getting a bit ridiculous.
|
| Svelte appears to get rid of some of the boilerplate and
| verbosity stuff you find in other frameworks, though it's
| still a pretty magic framework. Looking forward to trying out
| SvelteKit.
| wwww4all wrote:
| Everyone should google MS Frontpage. And COBOL.
|
| As the saying goes, "What has happened before, will happen
| again".
|
| Soon enough, there will be a new scripting language to simplify
| managing all no code services from the terminal. NoBash.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Isn't this all on the same spectrum as all programming? Every
| programmer is using someone else's code at all times. Even if you
| are writing in assembly, you are still relying on a compiler to
| turn your written words into machine code.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Even if you are writing in assembly, you are still relying on
| a compiler to turn your written words into machine code.
|
| To nitpick, an assembler.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| It's sort of a spectrum yes... (or, really, there are infinite
| spectrums like the one you are imagining,) But there are also
| discontinuities on all of those spectrums.
|
| The ergonomics of a declarative API are not continuous with the
| ergonomics of a procedural one. There's just a gap there which,
| when you cross it, you lose a bunch of things, and get a bunch
| of other things for free.
|
| There'a also a huge discontinuity when moving from code to
| point-n-click, which is what the article is about. Many of the
| affordances of code cannot be replicated in a GUI, with ANY
| amount of effort. And vice versa.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I spent the first years of my career writing "no code" signal
| processing platform. It had it's ups and downs. We indeed had a
| lot of non-coder users and it made prototyping simple to
| moderately complex pipelines quickly. However relatively soon for
| anything actually useful we had to write more components, some of
| which were not really reusable because it's non trivial to hide
| the complexity. At some point most workflows ended up in a
| "python script executor", because in the end code is always more
| expressive.
|
| Also, no version control. Or, in our case since we used XML for
| output: poor version control. Reading horror stories about Excel
| also confirm this, it is hard to do correct complex programs in
| visual environments.
| BatFastard wrote:
| I hate to be the guy who say back in my day... but back in the
| 90's there was a tool by Borland (anyone remember them?) who
| created a no-code, low-code tool called Delphi. It was awesome, I
| used it on a few front end projects and it active data source
| tools made laying out complex UI's so painless. Of course this
| was back before Rest APIs and the internet for most part. But it
| kicked some serious ass.
| ant6n wrote:
| I found Jetbeans was somewhat similar, about 15 years later.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Delphi still exists:
| https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
| adjagu wrote:
| Unless I have stumbled across something different it appears as
| if this is still being developed. I have no idea if what I have
| linked is even remotely close to what you remember it being.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Delphi_(software)
| breck wrote:
| What you want is "low code". Or less rhymey but more accurate:
| "minimal code".
|
| Historically visual programming tools did not create this. In
| fact they generated very bloated code. So visual programming
| tools got a bad rap.
|
| But there's no inherent reason why they need to generate bloated
| code. And if well done they can indeed generate minimal code (and
| program synthesis advancements will help a lot here).
|
| We worked on this from ~2010 at Nudge and we eventually solved it
| with the discovery of Tree Notation.
| k__ wrote:
| Why does it have to be visual?
|
| If I can use a library or a framework that saves me from
| writing thousands of LoC, that's low-code too.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Visual inherently opens the product up to non-developers,
| which is where a lot of the commercial opportunity lies.
| josho wrote:
| Visual vs code masks the real concern which is people that
| can analyze a problem, decompose it to smaller parts.
|
| I'm not convinced that the new tools make that problem any
| easier except for the most trivial problems.
| the_af wrote:
| If they are going to write non trivial code, they better be
| developers.
|
| Corollary: all trivial code expands, little by little, into
| a non trivial beast. Years later, developers dealing with
| the mess are going to ask why things are the way they are,
| and they are going to be told "this was started by people
| with little coding experience, it was supposed to be a
| throwaway minor thing..."
| auggierose wrote:
| Discovery of tree notation, are you kidding me?
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