I've seen a lot more interest for this kind of tool in enterprise environments recently. Never seen this kind of interest before. I'm curious on how this is going to pan out.
It has been a perennial dream for six decades. The creators of Cobol and Fortran thought that was what they were producing! (Not literally no-code, but the notion that computing by non-specialists would result from putting assembler and other hardware-oriented knowledge under the covers.) After that, there were several waves of hype and disillusionment, though that seems to have dampened down in the 21st century.
Spreadsheet programs are arguably the closest we got up to now, and that was a long time ago.
I think the potential value for niche line of business apps. The kinds of things that used to be drive by a spreadsheet can now be driven by a spreadsheet-driven mobile app with better defined workflow. I think this won't really displace much, if any, real development work. It will open up a lot of smaller tasks to automation. The kind of things that weren't valuable enough to warrant an expensive development project.
I was involved with a project to bring these low-code / no-code tools into a financial company. I think its almost all driven out of the idea that software developers are expensive and development takes a long time. The "Dream" is that the business analyst or financial analyst or whomever automates their own job away, or that they write the business process (While being paid half as much!). Of course the issue is that they can't easily do this while they are also doing their own job, mistakes are made and they need "real" software developers to come in, it takes just as long or longer, etc.
