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IMVHO the "low code" environment have a name: end-user programming. The thing the entire entire industry have done it's best to destroy it after Xerox, Symbolics.

The rest is the nth failed tentative to makes users jailed by ignorance selling the idea people can do thing without knowing things. It will fail like any other tentative done before.




Microsoft Excel is end-user programming. The amount of businesses that have critical processes done entirely in Excel is both impressive and terrifying.

It is basically a database, reporting tool, IDE and half a dozen other things all rolled into one giant mess.


I know an SMB that has all its operations on Google Sheets. They told me they don't have time to learn any tool (all their efforts go to keep the business running), and they don't have the money to hire a full-time dev. I offered them the opportunity to develop their platform pro bono. They're thrilled since they will be the first business with that type of platform.


This applies up, as well. I was involved in talks with a household name (in the US at least) retail store that still managed purchasing for all of their locations via spreadsheet, and had a team of 8 people who were allowed to touch it at any given point to reconcile inventory.

They had looked at getting a proper purpose-built system in place, but I don't know what happened after that.


It's a mess because it try to be "made for ignorant users" instead of choose the classic desktop way.

First: in classic systems the OS is a single application/framework where anything or nearly anything is accessible by end users, so there is no special integration limit that force devs to reinvent the wheel to have anything in a single modern app and reinvent it in bad way since they have no time nor resources even at the big tech sizes, plus the need to invent ways to circumvent system design limits.

Being a single app means if I have a CAS installed I can solve an ODE in an email just typing it and pass the math expression to a relevant CAS function, no need to reinvent a basic or less basic calculator. No need to know all the stuff about making it. I just access the relevant functions written by some expert and tuned for that purpose. The dev does not need to know, it's the user who know and use.

Secondly means an incredible simplification. Let's talk for instance about a Plan9 mail client: what kind of beast is? Well it's just a base64-to-text reader and writer. Nothing more. The connection to the webserver is just a universal system connection to a remote file server, a remote filesystem mounted somewhere under the local root. All you need to do is knowing how to access a local fs, read text files, read/encode base64. Nothing more. Sending an email is just saving a text file with a given name in the right place. Publish a website is the same BTW, so it's sharing a file. Being a single app-framework means that anything is simpler, there is not much duplication of functions, only tuning.

Now try to see an example of modern Emacs in action like https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k how much complicated is creating a slide? Well just zoom some org-mode text. A table like a spreadsheet? It's just text and can be passed to any programming language supported by org-babel as data.

Doing so meaning no lock-in possible and the end-user in control, that's why all the modern IT industry starting back then with the not-so-modern IBM, have demolished this, but the result is a mess. A decade after another we tend to the old model wasting gazillions of resources to keep up an untenable business model.


It's not that terrifying in my opinion, it's mostly just impressive.

From a business standpoint it's probably the single most useful software platform ever invented.




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