Hypercard is the IKEA for software.

The comparison to artisanal furniture really lands because we do spend way too much time on the basics. It would be nice to just assemble the pieces we need and move on to the interesting work.

People have been building low code or modular software components for decades - at all layers of the software stack- eg compilers, languages, frameworks, libraries, components, platforms, extensions, you name it..

Just some examples over the years

Odoo, flutter, eclipse, enterprise java beans, wpf, n8n, package manager based approaches, microsoft power apps, app builders, supabase,

Which one is ikea?

software is an abstract quantity dependent on nothing but human whim, tech progress, and popularity and cost to build, and changes year over year - you cannot build a ikea like collection or library of components when everything changes year over year like a house or sand and no one agrees on anything

Now if you could pick and choose a few things and have a CRUD app maybe -but most people have reqs that need specific workflowsand that breaks the analogy

To me, AI iteration is biggest revolution of the past few years- ai might allow fuzzy modifications to largely built stacks to work something like an ikea style approach

Probably those SAP, Salesforce ServiceNow folks come somewhat closer?

Like the author says - fleet-tracking system, a bus-ticketing platform or IoT platform share some basically similar requirements. And this is what those SAP types offer - standardised templated versions of workflows.

But slowly, as they get more and more standardised, they start feeling like calcified systems that the end users start hating. Because they are now forced to work as per the templates.

And then the need for customization. And move beyond IKEA-like standardization.

But I see the allure of the idea.