We sell an integration platform-as-a-service[1] and it offers a 'low code' visual environment to stitch together integrations.
But from pretty much the start, we built-in support to drop down to Javascript to build logic and we think we hit a sweet spot there.
You can visually string together most components but drop in a bit of script to concisely define some hairy transformation or complex logic.
These kinds of low code environment are great for doing customizations or enhancements or integrating many things together. It's very much not an optimal solution for building entire applications or software solutions.
There's also the issue of tooling. There's a huge amount of infrastructure built around maintaining large application code bases (version control, merging, diffing). If you want to build large pieces of software in a no-code environment you still need all of those tools - except they don't exist and are non-standard.
As the article points out, the problem with these is they are sold as a silver bullet and companies who don't know any better will spend millions building putting a lot of code in the script nodes on their "low code" platform.
Code that can't be unit tested properly, that has at best some really crappy tools for automation and limitations that drive everybody crazy (ie getting logs into es/splunk or whatever - syslog UDP over the internet ftw!)
You are clearly a responsible vendor, I wish the others I deal would be honest with their customers about what the low codes do well vs what they dont
We sell an integration platform-as-a-service[1] and it offers a 'low code' visual environment to stitch together integrations.
But from pretty much the start, we built-in support to drop down to Javascript to build logic and we think we hit a sweet spot there.
You can visually string together most components but drop in a bit of script to concisely define some hairy transformation or complex logic.
These kinds of low code environment are great for doing customizations or enhancements or integrating many things together. It's very much not an optimal solution for building entire applications or software solutions.
There's also the issue of tooling. There's a huge amount of infrastructure built around maintaining large application code bases (version control, merging, diffing). If you want to build large pieces of software in a no-code environment you still need all of those tools - except they don't exist and are non-standard.
[1] https://lucyinthesky.io