"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.

Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?

I suspect it has to do with not noticing and/or not caring when things are shit.

Like when the context menu does not open or you can't place text below a table? Of course, the system will freeze or crash eventually just when everything looks like it should after 2 hours of random trial and error. But that's just when editing content.

The real fun starts when you try to extend and provide new content modules for those systems as a developer.

Sheer willpower. Imagine clicking your way into building a website, oof

Not so much magic as stubbornness. People obsess over not wanting to write code, or hire programmers, to the point of "forgetting" about product quality and maintainability altogether.

I see this a lot in tooling for 3D artists and game engines. Generally, they give you a node-based system for doing things like defining logic states, image transforms, procedural textures, shaders, etc.

These are fine for solving simple things fast, but when you start getting serious with them it tends to become an absolute, inefficient mess of a fustercluck, up to a point where coding would invariably take less effort.

I suppose the typical user of any such tools assumes coding would *always* be much more complicated, and so they press on motivated by how "easy" they have it; tragic and blissful ignorance.

Or maybe they're reptilian space wizards, you never know.

it's less confusing to them than code which doesn't natively enter their brain but bubbles do

they're kind of doing config-driven development

ofc being programmers that's ridiculous to us since we don't have a problem with text or looking up docs tho

to be fair I think no-code stuff often has been designed to integrate with tons of other little utility no code stuff

so it's kind of like a different flavour of Linux. you're just piping results from one command into the other

@Liebranca Godot has a node system, but in Godot 4 they have removed the visual programming stuff they had. It was hurting people in the long run. The attitude now is you cannot really go far unless you can code.

@Demolishun Middle of the road would've been better -- something like script nodes is fun to have. A side of my brain giggles when I think about writing classes and functions on one hand, then wiring them visually on the other, as if modules were components in a circuit.

I don't recall seeing it beyond my imagination though. I wonder if there's any good implementation of this, for general use. I was never fond of flowcharts but something like that might be useful for sketching small systems.

@Liebranca oooh that sort of sounds like a control flow debugger

Maaan! Fucking hell, my company uses elementor for our website and it's a god damned mess. Boss's wife came and asked me to help her with elementor. I tried. I genuinely tried and eventually succeed, after two cups of coffee.

The selection box jumps around, margins between elements in the editor are so miniscule that your mouse curser almost selects two elements at once, ...

Horrible piece of software.

@Liebranca you are giving me visio flashbacks. Noooooooo!