Alex Hudson alexhudson.com

The "no code" delusion  ↦

Alex Hudson:

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.

We had a great dialog about this topic on our 2020 predictions episode of JS Party. I tend to agree with Alex’s analysis, which is in-depth and well-reasoned. What do you think about the “no code” movement? Hype or reality? Somewhere in between?


Discussion

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Al Chen

Al Chen

New York, NY

Solutions Architect @ Coda.io

2020-01-19T22:45:26Z ago

Somewhere in between. I think the “no-code” phrase is a good moniker for all the platforms that are coming up, but the abstraction, as Alex points out, has been around for a while. Perhaps with social media has become an easy way to hitch whatever you’re working on that doesn’t involve code to the movement.

I’ve been working with spreadsheets for the last 10+ years and never considered it no-code, it was just spreadsheets. But now one could argue that working with spreadsheets means you’re part of the no-code movement.

Jerod Santo

Jerod Santo

Omaha, Nebraska

Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.

2020-01-20T15:36:01Z ago

I agree, and it does seem to be mostly a (very strong) marketing term. Reminds me a bit of JAMStack in that way. I lol’d when Chris Hiller said this about it:

There’s just gonna be more people coding, there’s gonna be more code, there’s gonna be more no-code

Which makes me wonder… if the best code is no code at all, then what is the best no-code? 🤔

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