The Future of Computing

Few people are aware of how our world of computing is likely to change over the next 20 years. There is a quiet, unobtrusive but potentially disruptive technological change on the horizon that will fundamentally impact those of us who are in the software industry.

This technology is known as Low-Code.

Reality is Fat-Tailed

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about Kurtosis, and how financial models ignore, and subsequently get overwhelmed, by events that are five or more standard deviations from the mean. He called these events "Black Swans".

Low-Code is the Black Swan of our software world.

Low-Code Is Here.

Low-Code (or No-Code) platforms are just that. They allow you to create a software application with limited (or no) coding. Compile Squared, which I have co-founded, has built a powerful and extensible low-code platform. It can generate well-structured, modular and integrated code for web applications using ReactJS and back-end code using NodeJS within minutes. Currently, it generates code that could take 6-10 developers about six months to build, test and roll-out. The current language of choice is JavaScript, but the platform can generate Python, Dart, Scala or any other language in the near future. Compile Squared is currently at the Beta stage with this platform, and will be announcing it for customer deployments early 2020.

Code is Data, Data is Code

The fundamental tenet behind this platform is CIDDIC. In other words, code is in its essence a form of data, albeit, a complex form. The platform takes data, and uses it to generate code. This shift in perspective opens up new doors in what is possible, since data is significantly more malleable than code.

The Next Step in Software Evolution

Reflecting on the history of software languages and their evolution, every next step has vastly simplified and improved what could be achieved by the previous step. My first software program was in 8085 machine code. Next came assembly languages. Then systems programming languages like C with its libraries. Next we had object-oriented languages like Java with data and methods packaged neatly in classes. Finally, functional programming in JavaScript and Scala.

The next step in this evolution? Low-code! A small script or little metadata can generate effectively large amounts of imperative or functional coding statements.

Dark Horse

Not much is talked about low-code. It's certainly not yet on the Gartner Hype Cycle where they're still talking about decentralized autonomous organisms (what?). Certainly no mention of low-code platforms or frameworks in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Take your pick, whether Black Swan or Dark Horse, low-code is certainly not on the radar for most in the computing world.

Impact on the Software Industry

It's hard to overstate the impact of low-code on the software industry. Over the next 20 years from 2020 - 2040, I expect more and more of the new greenfield projects will use low-code to cut their development cost and time-to-market by 60% to 80%. Regretfully, it will cause some (possibly significant and definitely painful) consolidation in the software industry, with a shift in utilization from lower skilled to higher skilled software developers. Of course, from the target customer perspective, it will be more positive - generally be a shift towards lower software costs, faster time-to-market, and ability to get more complex projects delivered faster and cheaper. By 2040, it's unlikely that our software landscape will any way resemble today's world.

Buckle up, it's going to be wild ride!