Currently, services allowing to create software without coding or only by doing it a minima via the cloud are booming.
Indeed, Microsoft forecasts that 500 million software programs will be developed in the next five years, more than all the computer programs created in the last forty years.
The problem?
In the United States alone there is currently a shortage of one million code professionals, not to mention Europe and Asia.
The situation was quite simple: we had to find solutions to design software faster without using an army of coders. For a long time, a hundred people could spend years developing software.
Today, with no-code, a small handful of developers can create software in a few months or even faster.
Four hundred and fifty million pieces of software will therefore have to be created using a no-code or low-code tool, because there are not enough professionals who can work fast enough in this field to design so many programs.
When New York City was affected by the Coronavirus, the city council created software to manage the crisis in the space of 3 days without writing a single line of code. It called upon the start-up company Unqork. Supported by investors such as Alphabet (Google) or Blackrock, Unqork makes it possible to develop a software using a simple interface, and without coding.
The no-code can be like a Lego game that should be assembled by drag and drop following a logic to arrive at the final result which will be a software.
Here no need to write a line of code, each brick already contains them.
Today, a real competition is underway between the many platforms that allow codeless development, including Microsoft’s Power Apps, Oracle’s Visual Builder for creating mobile and web applications, and Salesforce’s Lightning Platform for customer relationship management applications. Even Google is getting into the game with its recent acquisition of AppSheet, a code-free platform for building mobile applications.
Having said that, no-code answers a market issue, the imbalance between supply and demand, but it is certainly not the universal solution. It does not have the same precision and does not offer as many possibilities as code, it does not have the same flexibility and remains limiting.
Moreover, if everyone does his program his own way, a company can quickly end up with dysfunctional software that the real coders will have to debug.
Just because coding has been automated doesn’t mean that coders’ skills will disappear.
On the contrary! It’s even perhaps thanks to no-code that coders will become more and more indispensable as companies will need developers for exceptions or code building blocks that these platforms don’t and won’t support.
These no-code platforms are becoming a natural part of the software ecosystem, with an increasing number of companies moving to them, which makes coders all the more valuable as these skills will be worth their weight in gold in the very near future!
M.D