The Visual Basic Legacy of Low-Code

My latest column on The New Stack is about the fast-growing trend of low-code:

Can you be a developer without hand-coding? It sounds like a sacrilegious question, like asking can you be a musician without playing an instrument. But with the increasing popularity of the “low-code” movement in the cloud native era — not to mention its “no-code” cousin — we are seeing more and more development work being done in a visual, largely codeless, environment.

Last August, Gartner named OutSystems as a leader in the “Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform” market, alongside Microsoft, Salesforce and Mendix. So in order to understand this trend better, I spoke with two OutSystems executives: Mike Hughes, Senior Director Product Marketing, and ex-Microsoft executive Barry Goffe, who recently started at OutSystems as senior vice president of platform strategy.

Fun fact…Visual Basic is still popular!

But there are reasons why Visual Basic was as successful as it was — and indeed, still is (incredibly, it’s currently ranked number 6 on the TIOBE Index). Visual Basic persists because businesses want to keep their software systems simple.

Image credit: Pixabay