DZone

COBOL was taught to me as a programming language that can supposedly be used directly by businesses, rather than businesses contacting programmers to write the code. For people who have never tried COBOL, you write programs called “Essays” with “Paragraphs” with a lot of capital letters and with whitespace margins on the left. The software industry always has this fascination with no-code technology. They want businesses to be able to create software that is not lost in the translation. This clearly proves the point that building software is not a technology problem, but rather a communication problem when it comes to actually using the technology.

The closest anyone has gotten to success with a no-code tool is none other than with the infamous Excel sheet. Why is it so successful? — because the data, formula, and outputs were close to each other, and the software required users to overcome only a very small learning curve. Business people who started using it turned it into a personal software that does a lot of things for them but is not useful to put to use even in simple production scales or to customize it for others. I have been given Excel sheets during the requirements phase and asked to transform that into software that can be used and extended as well. So though it worked, it could not scale to be a full-fledged software.

Source: DZone