When I first started building applications back in the 90’s, I did it using the only thing I could get my hands on at the time, Access 95. Many of these low-code tools just feel like a web version of that. Form builders, drag and drop, define data types, hook up queries to forms and fields to text boxes and grids. I guess I just got old enough to see the approach come full circle.
That was an explicit design goal of one I worked on a number of years ago.
These tools have their place: they allow smart technical people to be highly productive whilst abstracting a lot of the complexity away.
Low-code tools fill a gap, they're the PHP / Rails / Python for Line-Of-Business / data-driven apps. They allow you to achieve in days what would take weeks in those languages and months in C++.
Agree. And we’ve had those tools available for decades. These new low-code/no-code tools have exactly the same potential user base and exactly the same limitations. No new or even interesting problem is getting solved, just a fresh coat of paint. Or reinventing the flat tire, as Alan Kay put it.
How often do you see commercial or enterprise software written in Access or VBA? What happened to all of those? They either couldn’t grow with the business requirements, or they were so specific and idiosyncratic they couldn’t adapt and constrained the business with their limitations for years.
I've seen a fair number of Access applications that were rewritten simply because they need to work in a web browser. They were otherwise fine.
The system I worked on was specialised but highly capable - it could build applications that are very very hard to get right in PHP (but easy to get kind-of-right-if-you-squint).
What I would really love to see is a top class open source Low Code platform; I believe that it could provide a very nice tool of entry to software development, especially for adults.
