In the realm of low code, there is no king

Introduction: Low code under the spotlight

You can tell a lot about a technology just by looking at the people who advocate it. For example, those blowing DDD dry explosion micro services, usually do IT training, listen to the line, do not take IT seriously. But if it’s a group of tech CXOs, then maybe there’s enough reason to care about the technology’s capabilities, its present and its future, because whether a technology has enough commercial promise determines how far and how deep it can go — low code, for example.

• Low code is one of Microsoft’s biggest bets for 2019 and beyond — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
• Digital technology to serve the real economy, low code is an important trend — Zhang Jianfeng, president of Aliyun
• Low code is the next generation of change and improvement – Google

Almost every large enterprise has its own low code platform, such as:

• Microsoft: the PowerApps
• Amazon: Honeycode
• Google: Appsheet
• Ali: It goes well
• Tencent: micro build
• Huawei: AppCube
• Baidu: love speed build
• Byte: Recruiting

The technology under the tuyere, in addition to enjoying the spotlight dividend of flow attention, itself is also easy to become the target of public criticism, and there are not a few pessimists. Just as blockchain technology was once called disS as a solution to a problem I didn’t know what to solve, low code was once called ‘Why do I call low code’ a ‘cancer in the industry’ by my former colleague Xu Hao, CTO of Thoughtworks China. Set off the focus of public opinion.

What is low code, what can be done, is a new bottle of old wine, or something new, the current status of the industry is what, and where the future will be, this is the core issue I want to explore.

Origin: Not new

First let’s take a look at the low code definitions that are already rotten:

A technique or tool that allows applications to be developed quickly by writing little or no code and can be quickly configured and deployed.

This is the widely accepted technical definition of low code, issued in 2014 by Forrester Research. Back then, low code was at least eight years old, which is certainly nothing new in the cyclical, up-and-down world of technology. In fact, the concept of low code can be traced back to the idea of visual programming in the 1980s, and has occurred in similar forms ever since. Take the simplest example: you use a formula in Excel to differentiate a column of data, which is a basic form of low-code implementation.

One thing I want to emphasize here is: Low code and no code is not a thing, although the two are often industry together to discuss, but from the current technical ability and the foreseeable future technology development point of view, no code I personally think it is hard to set up platform, like artificial intelligence in the future of the visible to the naked eye will only bear the special auxiliary function, Until AI runs the entire software development process on its own, I find it hard to believe that a code-free platform will ever go from concept to reality.

As we saw in our previous article, 22 Predictions and Interpretations of 2022 Software Development Trends, the low-code platforms of the future will continue to gain momentum and use cases, at least in these scenarios:

• Web/ mobile App development
• Website and landing page
• Intelligent chatbots that use conversation streams
• The electronic commerce
• Machine learning
• Artificial intelligence (video, audio, image)
• Workflow management
• Process automation using RPA

Let’s move away from low-code technical implementations and take a look at a new class of technologies represented by low code. What are the common points that have emerged behind them?

For example, cloud computing enables the development team to focus on business development instead of building stations and maintaining operations. For example, Serverless allows developers to focus on business logic without caring about servers and servers. Low code, for example, frees engineers from writing code they don’t want to write to work on higher-value code.

The core common denominator of technological development is that people (engineers) no longer have to do the dirty work and devote their limited energy to work of infinite value. This is the real context of the development of new technologies.

From this perspective, low-code products are similar to API-type products, but low-code platforms exist more in the form of “platforms” that provide an environment to run and configure, while the latter are more flexible and mature than the low-code platforms.

Industry: Kingdoms, long live the King

Forrester’s 2021 software development forecast states that 75 percent of enterprises will prefer low/no code platforms for software development, up from 44 percent in 2020. According to Gartner’s latest forecast, the global market for low code development technologies will reach $13.8 billion by 2021, up 22.6% from 2020.

At home and abroad, money tends to go where it’s hottest, like real estate (cross it out), like technology. 2021 is the year of low code, following the “first year of AI” and “First year of blockchain”.

In this year, almost domestic and foreign science and technology CXO have low code technology platform, is also in this year, the head cloud manufacturers at home and abroad low code platform swarms up, low code startups at home and abroad “whistled together in the mountains”. Among the tech conferences I’ve been to in China, QCon, rare-Earth Developers Conference, low code topics are very popular. Developers, Tech leaders, and investors are all looking at the seemingly limitless potential of low code.

Last year, Seo Seong-yang, the author of silicon Valley Growth Strategy, made a comprehensive map of LCNC industry, including chat bot, marketing, DevOps, workflow, game development, data science, site building tools, mobile App development and many other fields, as many as 359 companies.

If you read more about foreign “indie games”, you will find that game development engines such as Unity and Ren ‘py can also be classified under LCNC. For example, the popular Steam domestic game Taiwu E Scroll was developed with Unity.

Photo source: shawn-s3.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/public/LCNC…

For a long time, China’s large-scale market for the development of emerging technology has brought robust development soil, started in Silicon Valley Kubernetes technology, in the world’s only one example of China’s e-commerce market, has been unprecedented challenges and applications, which also feed the development of Kubernetes technology.

From this point of view, the technology originated abroad, in the domestic application of the same trace to follow. In 2018, OutSystems, a 16-year-old company focused on low-code development platforms for 12 years, raised $360 million from KKR and Goldman Sachs. Outsystems has thus made it into the $1 billion club, becoming the new unicorn. It is reasonable to assume that similar players will emerge in China in the future.

According to the survey report of “Haibi Research Institute”, the scale of China’s low/no code market is 1.9 billion yuan in 2020, and is expected to maintain rapid growth in the next five years and reach 10 billion yuan in 2024. At present, the number of enterprises is nearly 70, mainly distributed in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities.

Why are low-code platforms valued by capital? Why does the industry voluntarily choose to invest in low-code platforms?

This background logic is consistent with the rapid development of audio and video technology in the past two years. In the era of digital transformation accelerated by the epidemic, the demand for digital transformation of enterprises is far higher than before, but the talent pool, development tools and management level of digital direction are far behind the market demand. This has led to a rush for low-code platforms that lower the barriers to development.

On the one hand, there are tech giants integrating low-code platforms into their cloud services, and on the other hand, there are startups focusing on low-code platform development. The current situation of the whole market is that there are many kingdoms, but there is no unified king. Given the current state of the industry, it’s hard to point to any low-code platform that stands out as the king of the low-code universe.

It is foreseeable that in the future, low-code platforms may face the same threats, competition and cooperation from head cloud vendors as cloud native databases, and the Matthew effect may become more prominent in this field.

The future: As many problems as opportunities

So far, we have basically clarified some questions:

• Low code is not new, it is a continuation and secondary innovation of some programming ideas
• The core nature of low code is to free up productivity and focus on business logic rather than development logic
• Low code industry status quo mountains, there is no unified industry players

So what are some of the problems holding back low code in the future?

First of all, I think the most essential problem with this new wheel, represented by Serverless and low code, is that it can only add to the cake, but not help. Its suitable scenarios are relatively lightweight, simple business logic, small service scale applications, more suitable for small and medium-sized companies to use.

Further, this kind of everyone is a product manager variant of everyone is a programmer, which lowers the threshold of the industry at the same time, pulls down the quality of the industry, and inevitably leads to the low level of applications developed with low code. On the other hand, if the way to train software engineers is from object-oriented programming to tool-oriented programming, the number of head programmers in the industry as a whole will decline sharply, and perhaps the midlife crisis in the industry will be more common in the future.

As for the low code platform itself, there are also many problems to be solved, the most obvious is the security problem. In the past few years, the issue of software security has become the focus of everyone’s attention. The goal of low-code platforms is to lower the threshold of software development and thus increase the number of “software developers”, but this also means that the vulnerability and attack are greatly increased. Imagine millions of people with similar code to me writing wheels on a low-code platform. Hackers would probably laugh in their dreams.

On the other hand, low code, due to its own limitations, does not fulfill many customization requirements, which also limits its application scenarios to areas that can only be standardized.

Overall, the future of low code is full of opportunities and problems. What we need to focus on is not the technology itself, but whether the problem it is trying to solve is universal or preconceived. Looking at the overall industry market, I personally think low code will have a broad development prospect, I would look forward to this kingdom without a king, there will be a king who can standardize the industry.