[HN Gopher] No code is a lie (2019) ___________________________________________________________________ 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? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-14 23:00 UTC)