Why do many programmers dislike low-code?

In the software industry, there is a famous book called “The Mythical Man-Month,” which includes a discussion that there is “no silver bullet.” Those who understand this concept should no longer be fixated on things like low-code development.

In simple terms, a silver bullet refers to a method that could increase software development efficiency tenfold. The author does not believe that any such technology will emerge within ten years (and it’s been about 50 years since then).

The reason is that software development has two kinds of complexity: inherent complexity and incidental complexity. Inherent complexity is the natural complexity of things and is unrelated to the tools or methods used. Incidental complexity is the additional complexity that arises from the methods and tools used to solve problems. Incidental complexity does not account for 9/10 of the overall complexity; therefore, even the best tools and methods cannot reduce complexity to 1/10. Throughout the years, from assembly language to C, to object-oriented programming, to various frameworks and methodologies, there have been substantial efforts to reduce incidental complexity, and they have been effective, but none have been a silver bullet.

The inherent complexity in software development reflects the complexities of the real world, not difficulties arising from learning and using programming languages. In fact, programming languages are designed as tools to address these complexities. We can constantly optimize our tools, or use different tools without understanding the problem, but clearly, the majority of our efforts need to be devoted to tackling the complexities of the real world.