No-code and low-code (esp. Glide)

[Thomas Green]

Does anyone here have experience and/or opinions about the no-code/low-code development?

I’d be particularly interested to hear about Glide. Their website says: 'Glide's mission is to create a billion new software developers by 2030”. 

Anyone used it? What are the pros and cons? Is it quicker ... more fun ... easier to debug ... etc?  They claim that 'Using basic spreadsheet skills, you can make incredible things with Glide’, which sounds as though they’re claiming that no other skills are needed.  Do you think that's true, or just hype? 

What about other systems?

Hoping to hear from some of you,

Thomas

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[Thomas Green]

Thanks Brett, that’s a very impressive thread.

@Linda MacIver: at the end of that thread he says LC/NC "can greatly reduce the barriers to entry for people. The trick is how to grow from here; those who've heard my CS Ed talks know I think a lot about this issue. ... But unlike many other "low floor" entry points, this one can produce truly useful things in truly short amounts of time. We shouldn't discount the value of that.”  That might be something to interest you – ’truly useful things’ easily made. Any thoughts?

Thomas

On 26 Jan 2022, at 20:58, Brett A Becker <bretta...@gmail.com> wrote:

Shriram Krishnamurthi recently did an exploration of the space and posted a huge Twitter thread on it. I don't see Glide mentioned there but he has mentioned it in other tweets. 

https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1485345768085110784

Brett

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[Linda McIver]

I think there’s huge potential here. We should not have to learn what Traceback Errors are, nor the intricacies of eg R data structures, in order to do effective data analysis.

That said, I’ve yet to find a truly usable interface for this kind of work - by which I mean usable for novices. I certainly have not done an exhaustive search of the space! And my classroom experiences with Scratch/snap and friends were awful. 

BUT even if a usable variant doesn’t exist yet, and I can’t say that with any certainty, it doesn’t mean a truly usable variant could not exist in the future! And even though I am a python loving text based dinosaur ,  I’m pretty sure visual languages (which most “no code” systems actually are, when you get right down to it) are the way to go… although I do wonder if we are missing something in our understanding of the meaning of text vs images… I feel like there is some elusive key that will make it all work, but it’s possible that’s just a yearning for a silver bullet.

I’m going to a Dagstuhl seminar next week on the human factors of error messages that Shriram is also attending (organised by Brett, among others), so who knows what will result!

I’ll be attempting to go nocturnal for the duration, and attending virtually. should be interesting!

Linda

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[Thomas Green]

Good, I think so too. As regards the ’truly usable interface’, that’s why I was particularly asking about Glide: there’s quite a lot of noise about it being the easiest to learn. I certainly found it easier than Bubble, BUT there are some surprising decisions: no secondary notation of any sort, not even comments (so I can’t say ’this method was invented by so and so’, nor ‘doing it this way because ...’); no way to diff two apps, in fact no juxtaposition; no debugging tools afaik. Lots of +ve features though.

I’m particularly interested in whether it’s fun to use, or maybe what Luke Church calls a ‘playful’ notation (not quite the same as being fun, if I understand him right). Also interested in whether it’s really going to be useful for end-user programmers, or only for professionals looking for ways to get work done fast.

Linda and Brett – hope Dagstuhl goes well, and please pump Shriram on this topic and report what he says!

Thomas