The views expressed below are personal

A few days ago, I saw an article on ThoughtWorks’ “Low Code is a cancer in the industry” on my wechat account. I quite agree with some of the opinions in the article and then posted it on my wechat moments. To my surprise, more of my colleagues expressed their disapproval of Bax’s statement.

First of all, I think the title of “Low Code” is a cancer in the industry. Of course, I personally think the title of “Low Code” is wrong. The whole video is actually about writing opinions on the “low code platform” rather than “low code”.

Badfork believes that Low Code is a cancer in the industry and has no future. The purpose of Low Code is to enable people who do not know software development to write code, which forms a contradiction between the capabilities provided by your Low Code platform and the quality requirements you have for the people who use it.

Octant believed that in order to solve a domain problem 100%, the platform must be Turing complete, and the one who can master Turing complete must be the programmer. This is makes sense, we can think so, if your platform can solve the problem of this area by 99%, that means you have their own rules, the platform is directive, standards, and so on to achieve some flexible ability, in a sense, this is a new programming language, and able to skillfully use the platform, that is, the programmer.

Of course, what Ocfork refutes is the claim of the current Low Code platform that non-professionals can achieve the autonomy of programmers. I think ocfork is reasonable in this point. With the existing technology, we cannot achieve a complete, The low Code Platform does not require much learning cost or professional knowledge. The low Code Platform is easy to use, but it does not take much time to develop. What the Low Code Platform cannot solve, will eventually fall back to the development hands.

In the past, we tried low code platform-SQL. In order to enable non-technical people to access the data of the database, it finally evolved into a new language — SQL.

In order to achieve 100% flexibility and autonomy, the Low Code Platform will most likely evolve into a programming language, which is not worth the cost.

Of course, we can say that all low Code platforms at this stage are not designed to solve 100% of the problems. Similarly, when a tool or platform can solve 50% or even less of the problems in a certain field, we think it is actually very valuable.

If only to solve part of the problem and provide some customization capability, why not do saas and part of the customization switch

As for some arguments of Ocx, I actually agree with most of them. Of course, after watching the comments on the video and the opinions in the circle of friends, most people think that

The Low Code Platform is not necessarily aimed at non-programmers, and it does not seek to be Turing complete and 100 percent corresponding to development.

First of all, most of the low code platforms on the market (such as OutSystems and Mendix abroad, Tritium Cloud and iVX in China, etc.) combine applications in a visual way, advocating that even non-IT personnel can build quickly. This means that the Low Code Platform is positioned to include both non-IT people and IT people.

This is an embarrassing problem. As a programmer, I certainly hope that Low Code Platform can solve most of the problems in the field of business development, and reduce the workload and transfer IT to non-IT people (such as product, operation, etc.). However, the reality is that the coverage of low Code Platform for non-professionals is not comprehensive. If low Code Platform is targeted at developers, to say the least, we should take pains to study how to use and combine the platform, and some of them may not meet the needs. Is it really going to save us more time than if we just developed using off-the-shelf component libraries and tools? What is the value of the whole Low Code platform if it takes more events than development, or if the amount of work reduced is minimal?

Low Code itself has many meanings. If low Code is taken as the purpose, it will include too much. The ultimate purpose of all tools and libraries is low Code, but if it is taken as the implementation method, can low Code platform really achieve our purpose and improve work efficiency? That’s something we need to think about.

I’m not against Low Code, but I’m not a fan of the Low Code Platform.