That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read.

After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things.

My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.

Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks.

Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.

I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span.

So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.

The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.

When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".)

Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.

I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position.

> Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy.

While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice.

> Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared.

These tools are succeeding because:

- They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team

- They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity

- They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc.

Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening.

And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win.

It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline.

These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.

> You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it...

It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost.

> ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it?

I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up.

For these reasons I think your analogy is not effective. I don't disagree with your thesis, though; I prefer code in almost all cases. But that's just me. I know for certain, though, that if I had stock options in that company in this hypothetical scenario I'd rather keep Karen around than whoever fixes the VLOOKUP syntax. And if visual tools are what empowers Karen... well, there you go.

Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?

Software developers really need to internalize that, unless they're working at a company that sells software, they're not the critical path for the business [2]. They're a cost center, and people are going to route around that cost center if it becomes an obstacle.

If it takes months of work to build an urgent back-office tool, then yeah, the back-office / operations / sales / legal / finance / compliance / whatever staff are going to use whatever they have available to get the job done sooner. And no-code tools are strictly better than Excel for many of those use cases. Karen from accounting isn't going to delay the quarterly numbers because you need to do system design.

[1] except in the sense that developers are too slow and expensive.

[2] And even at software companies, a lot of software developers are not critical for the business, but don't seem to understand this.