A second look at "no code" tools (2019)
My experience with visual programming is that, as the required complexity of the tasks grows even just minimally, it frustrates skilled users without really empowering unskilled ones.<p>That&#x27;s because the unskilled stays unskilled for a reason: they can&#x27;t or won&#x27;t dedicate the amount of focus necessary to learn a technology to any meaningful degree. They will do the minimum they are (very explicitly) trained to do, and that&#x27;s it. Basic scripting is not hard; if you cannot (or will not) do it, chances are you cannot (or will not) formalize even slightly-complex tasks in a visual environment either.<p>And of course, visual environments are a productivity killer for the skilled, who then feel frustrated and eventually drop back into textual modes. This is self-evident.<p>Sadly, it&#x27;s a marketing dream, so it keeps popping up in all companies in my niche. &quot;If only we build a no-code graphical UI, accountants will become programmers!&quot; - no they will not. If they were really interested in automating tasks and modelling problems, they would have already learnt VBA, which is very simple - smart accountants do it already. People capable of doing advanced math are capable of programming if they really want. Accountants who won&#x27;t learn VBA will not meaningfully engage with visual paradigms either, because they are simply not interested in these activities. What really needs to happen is to empower smart accountants to be productive without involving IT. That doesn&#x27;t need visual programming, it just needs a powerful set of VBA apis unshackled from &quot;enterprise&quot; permission systems.