Many businesses fail attempting to do digital transformation to access these benefits. The downside of trying to make this jump is that suddenly you’re becoming, at least in part, a software development company. Surprise: most companies are not good at this! A software environment is one of infinite possibility because most everything is achievable, with enough resource (time, money, people).

But the representation of the logic doesn’t reduce the fundamental complexity of the thing that it describes. In the same I way I can write “two” and “2” and mean the same thing, there are many ways of writing out business logic.

That means no code is possible if the end result involves no logic or just simple logic. At the same time, if logic is not heavily involved then that wouldn’t be the software system that the company is looking for so badly, and won’t be able to get away from being democratized.

as an example, you can define extremely complex software in Salesforce Cloud, without having to write a single line of code. It’s a mix of visual programming, basic rule setting and configuration.

With “no code”, it tends to be difficult or impossible to have a non-production environment. Even if you do have one, accurately copying changes over from one to the other is non-trivial. Salesforce has some excellent tooling available to make this work, and even in that environment it’s extremely difficult to do.

There are many tools which, while not “no code” per se, also allow users to produce more technical output. My favourite example is Looker, the business intelligence tool, but there are many such in different niches. As an aside on Looker: I find it extremely interesting that a lot of the model development in that environment happens in plain text, using regular software development tooling. I think this is one of the reasons it has ended up being successful.