ISSUE 270: The Frustrating Paradox of Low-Code Programming

“We have to stop thinking about security as gates between our phases. And instead, we have to look at how security integrates into those phases.”

Today’s developer seems to be working with more tools than ever. Building a Node.js-based JavaScript application could require over a dozen tools to get code out into production. It’s easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole and not stay focused. Debugging an application once in production can also be a challenge: You want as much context at your fingertips as needed while maintaining a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio.

Dan O’Brien, a software engineer for feature management platform provider LaunchDarkly, has a personal interest in how to keep from being distracted/staying in the flow when working on a new feature or any piece of code.

In this very latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we ask O’Brien about the complexities he sees in today’s developer workflow, as well as some tips he has to stay “in the zone” when writing code. We’ll also discuss the tools that LaunchDarkly has that can help expedite application development. TNS founder and Publisher Alex Williams, along with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson, hosted this podcast.

The Frustrating Paradox of Low-Code Programming

Has the time for low-code tools finally come? Industry veterans have known the term “low code” for well over a decade now. The promise is that programming shouldn’t just be the domain of developers. Tools and languages should be easy enough for anyone to create an application — even business managers! 

In practice, however, the previous generation of tools have fallen into the same trap: The easier they are to use, the more brittle they become, hobbling creativity to a limited number of well-established pathways. One great low-code success story has been Microsoft Excel, arguably the most popular application ever. But many other platforms have tried and failed to make programming palatable to all.

In a recent episode of the Real Python Podcast, Meredydd Luff, co-founder of the Python-based Anvil web framework, discussed some of the challenges in bringing programming to the masses. “Here is the problem: You are telling the computer what to do. And have we have been doing that for about three-quarters of a century now. And in that time, nobody has come up with a better way of telling computers what to do than to write text in a programming language,” he said. Most attempts either simplify it so much that the functionality is severely limited, or they require so much work that you might as well learn a programming language instead, Luff argued.

The idea behind Anvil is that it simplifies web development by leaning on a single language — the easy-to-understand Python — rather than asking the user to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript just to put together a web page. The software offers a GUI to visually design a webpage, but also offers the full flexibility of Python should the user require it. “We should not be scaring people away from code. Code is good. You should be able to get somebody to the code without it being so scary or intimidating dealing with all the other layers,” Luff said to the podcast host, Christopher Bailey.

Of late, The New Stack has been looking at the current state of low-code programming and seeing some evolution. 

And at the Microsoft Build 2021 virtual conference last month, Microsoft introduced the Power Platform, which as the company explained, enables “citizen developers” to build apps more efficiently. Last year, we looked at OutSystems — a company that, perhaps not surprisingly has roots in Microsoft — that is focused more on how low code could help existing developers build out their applications more quickly.

Almost nine out of ten developers using low code to build internal tools like it and plan to use it again, TNS Analyst Lawrence Hecht recently reported. Should we be covering more low-code solutions? Let us know!

Correction to last week’s newsletter (2021-06-04): The quote “We are all made of stars but your RBAC shouldn’t be” should be attributed to security expert Ian Coldwater.

This Week in Programming: Google Gets into the Open Source Insights Game

Last week Google launched an exploratory visualization site called Open Source Insights that gives users an interactive view of dependencies of open source projects. Now, Google isn’t the first to get into the game of trying to uncover and perhaps untangle the dizzying dependency graph of the open source world, but the company argues that it is more so trying to lay everything out in a way that developers can see, visually, just how, well, hopelessly screwed they really are.

Beyond the 3 Pillars of Observability

The traditional three pillars observability — logs, metrics, and distributed traces — is outdated and overly-focused on technical instrumentation and underlying data formats, rather than outcome, argues Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao, in this contributed post. He looks to a deeper understanding of observability, one that looks to outcomes, rather than specifying the inputs (i.e., the toolsets often discussed today). 

GitLab Brings on UnReview to Solve Code Review, Address AI/ML DevOps

Software life cycle services provider GitLab recently acquired UnReview, a machine learning (ML) tool that helps identify appropriate code reviewers, both to bring this functionality to its DevOps platform, as well as to further its overall mission to “build data science workload needs into the entire open DevOps platform,” the company states.