My first project out of college was working on an internal metrics tool for a company. Their prior one was basically Excel; a guy who was due to retire had, back in the 90s, written an entire DSL with VBA, that could load files, run various functions on them, and output graphs.
Thing is, no one except him knew the DSL; everyone in the company relied on it, but they relied on him to write the DSL to compile their inputs into the output they wanted.
The rewrite included an actual database, proper data ingestion, and a nice clean frontend. The methods of aggregating data were reduced and standardized, as were the types of simulations and metrics that could be reported on; the flexibility was drastically reduced. However, the practical usage for everyone was drastically increased, because it moved from "we can't do anything different unless we get (expensive due to retire person's time)" to "we can do it ourselves.
I'm very jaded toward no/low code, in general, and that experience is partly the reason why. There isn't a sweet spot, that I've seen, that allows for non-technical people to have the control they want. And that was true even with spreadsheets.
Thing is, no one except him knew the DSL; everyone in the company relied on it, but they relied on him to write the DSL to compile their inputs into the output they wanted.
The rewrite included an actual database, proper data ingestion, and a nice clean frontend. The methods of aggregating data were reduced and standardized, as were the types of simulations and metrics that could be reported on; the flexibility was drastically reduced. However, the practical usage for everyone was drastically increased, because it moved from "we can't do anything different unless we get (expensive due to retire person's time)" to "we can do it ourselves.
I'm very jaded toward no/low code, in general, and that experience is partly the reason why. There isn't a sweet spot, that I've seen, that allows for non-technical people to have the control they want. And that was true even with spreadsheets.