"One could criticize no-code for not offering the flexibility and nuance you can get by writing your own code, line by line. But the truth is, for all the hoopla about Silicon Valley's innovative genius, a huge number of apps don't do much more than awfully simple things. Seriously: Silicon Valley's main trick is just shoving things into a database and pulling them out again. I'm exaggerating, but only a bit."Thompson is so right about the "trick". There's lots of details to get right - making sure people shove in the right stuff (UI) making sure the wrong people can't then pull out other people's stuff (security) ensuring lots of people can shove (scalability) and coaxing people to put the stuff in (UX) but 80-90% of everything is this database shoving.
That's also adjacent to a model I had to make to describe the priorities of some new-fangled systems for UI - there's been a strong tend towards "declarative" programming for making web apps - with an assumption that the best thing a UI toolkit could do is make it super easy to have the webpage instantly update itself to reflect the content of the data in the browser's memory - that way the programmer doesn't have to manipulate the page, just massage the data. It took me a while to realize that one reason I was slow to see the appeal is that I never thought the "in browser memory" mattered much - the stuff in your server's database is what really matters, and the presentation of it on the webpage to the user matters, but anything in between (like the data in the browser's memory) is just an artifact.
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