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Should You Learn To No-Code?

Adrian Twarog on February 18, 2022

What is nocode? Why are more web companies, agencies, marketing businesses and branding expecting to hire developers who work with no-co...
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Chris Ochsenreither • Edited

" While a lot of programmers enjoy the act of coding, there is going to be no dispute that companies in the next few years will be transitioning to using no-code tools to build their platforms on."

Really? No one disputes that?

Did you ever hear of Winforms? It's going to take the world by storm - in 2002!
No, what'll happen is that non-software businesses will build CRUD apps with generic components with these tools to save money and software companies and software dev shops will continue to write code. Without the ability to code, you are sandboxed into the features that the no-code solution provides. There are always business needs outside of those features.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Hey Chris, Did you ever hear of Minidisks? 🀣

But seriously, I can think of a visual code solution that is tremendously successful and yet still needs a plug-in API with scripting. That's the type of overhead a "no code" solution creates, if anything, then you need a sub par embedded code editor to write all that code but not code.

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CuriousDev

I think it depends a lot on the No-Code technology we are talking about and looks like this is about limited web development. If you want to learn programming and like it, just do it and you will still be able to learn any "no-code" technology you are supposed to work with.
It is not good to compare this with programming like it would be the same or a replacement. Especially if you are learning for future employment, you should not do that, because you will not only be very limited to certain software, but also miss a lot of important knowledge, which also can be applied to these tools.

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Thorsten Hirsch

Why are these tools called "no-code" if they are just visual component editors that generate code? They're nice, but we already have these tools like forever and they cover only a fragment of the tasks a developer has to do. It's quite possible that integrating another tool in your workflow even leads to less efficiency overall.

They're highly disputable.

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Nicolus

If it can only handle web front-end (like Editor X seems to), isn't "No Code" just a fancy word for "WYSIWYG editor" ? Dreamweaver had something like that in the 90s.

If I recall correctly you could even do database interactions with very minimal coding using coldfusion.

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Matt Laser

This is illogical - given that no-code software explicitly intends to circumvent the entire concept of developers, not empower them. It's also disingenuous, given that the platform you're shilling, Editor X, is paying you to do just this.

@ben maybe I'm being a baby here but I think it's kinda messed up that this (a sponsored post for a no-code tool) got bubbled up by the official dev.to twitter account

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Ξ›GΣΣK

Nah! I use no-code tools when needed but they're not something to invest. I believe we should be good at coding to call ourself software engineer.

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CuriousDev

I think "invest" is a good word here. If you like and can do that, prefer programming. This is a better "investment" and will help to better understand many technologies, which are supposed to be "no-code" or "low-code".

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Max Ong Zong Bao

For me, it like making a Katana by craftsman. Sure you can create a Kanata by following the traditional ways but it will be time consuming to do everything manually.

But it doesn't make you less of a craftsman. Even if you adopt new tools to make your Kanata while you preserve the tradition process as well as quality to work with the tools to build faster, better quality and adopting methologies to build things differently.

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Kiran S Baliga

In my opinion I think that learning no code might come in handy! You could always start from no code to get the base layout done. This helps to eliminate creating stuffs from scratch that we already know and saves us a lot of time!!! Then modify those initial layout to create your final app/website.. I used to make some website by this way.. I design the basic structure in bootstrap studio and then modify the html and CSS code and then make them the way I want and adding additional stuffs that no code platforms can't provide.

Anyways this is MY opinion...

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Jonas Manthey

Well, you might have no code but still need logic in your application unless it is static. And logic is imho best represented in code. For design questions and boilerplate stuff no-code is awesome though.

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Emilien Bidet

Very nice article πŸ‘

I will create my portfolio that I always wanted to create in no code right now.

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Zikitel22

If you --> REALLY <-- feel threatened by no-code solutions. You actually might be right. Other than yhat you are probably ok ;)