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Will Low-Code Make Developers Redundant?

Dom | Five.Co on September 20, 2022

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Nathan Kallman

Nice take on No/Low Code! Thanks for cross-posting.

I like Five's stance "Built By Developers For Developers", I think the future is in new types of developers for any "code-less" language (that's what's happened for each new higher level language; adoption by a new type of technical person, never adoption by non-technical people).

What does unit testing look like on five.co? That's one of the main barriers to "victory" I identified when I wrote about No/Low Code's (lack of) adoption:

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Dom | Five.Co

Hey Nathan, thanks for sharing and good point on unit testing.

Five breaks down an application into its individual units: functions, processes, queries, etc. These are all isolated and can be tested separatedly. Let's say you have a dashboard that calls a query: you can test that query right when it's written inside Five. You can also run the app inside a dedicated dev environment with a debugger that shows exactly which piece of code is run when & where. All of this helps improve the quality of your code and makes testing pretty easy.

A bit difficult to describe this in words, but I'd be happy to connect for a demo if you're keen!

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Red Ochsenbein (he/him) • Edited

If I take a look at the specs I usually get I can clearly say we're safe.

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Mike Talbot ⭐

4GL languages were going to be the end software developers, that's the 90s for you... Will it come? One day I imagine it will... If low-code/no-code can remove the burden of writing the same old stuff again and again then I welcome it... Push the load onto people who can do that part - there's a lot more to innovating and building a system though.

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Dom | Five.Co

Good comment and I fully agree. A developer is really a problem-solver and their "tool" is code. Low-code platforms (or abstractions) help solve some of the problems that a developer has to deal with (especially the more tedious tasks involved in building a web app, such as creating forms or deployment).

But some problems are too complex to be solved without writing code. That's where developers come in (and will continue to come in): by cracking the really difficult stuff in full code.

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Arth

Development should feel truly fulfilling and fun. If no-code/low-code does that for the majority of developers, it might become the standard. If not, well developers won't be using it for more than prototyping at best. Low-code is too much opinionated abstraction and no-code is even a step further in that direction.

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Dom | Five.Co

Great comment. it reminds of me of a quote from the "Mythical Man-Month".

In the book the author asks: "Why is programming fun?" and the response he gives is: "Its the sheer joy of making things." :)

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Ravavyr

Frankly, the only answer to this question is "LOL, No."
or at least "Not any time soon...decades away maybe"

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Dom | Five.Co

You just summed up my entire article in two lines. 😆

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Keff

Came to say this!

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Alex Lohr

Who will develop and maintain the low-code and no-code environments? That's right, developers.

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Kartik

The developers who build no code tools and maintain them are different from developers he is talking about in his article, maybe you are confused between two

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Alex Lohr

While there may be a few developers who are one-trick ponies, any experienced developer can do a no-code environment as well as the software it attempts to enable without code.

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Sindou Koné

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