The first real low-code solution was a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were what drove businesses to buy PCs in the early 80s.
In the 90s, CASE (computer-automated software engineering) was a big thing. Powerbuilder was huge. Novell had one where you could draw a flowchart and fill in dialogs to make client-server apps... UI builders became common as language vendors added graphical IDEs to their game.
In the 00's we had a lot of visual development tools for websites. Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc...
In the 10's we had Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes.
Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code.
Originally, SQL was sold as a way to make programmers redundant by allowing business people to write their own reports.
In theory, with SQL any executive could write his own report instead of having to wait for weeks for those pesky software guys to write the reports.
For many decades, different waves in the industry have tried to bring tools to the market to allow non-programers to write programs. The thinking is that the tooling or the grammar are the obstacles for regular people to write programs (applications).
The issue is that it is not the syntax or the tools that are the barrier. The barrier to write programs is that the author has to thing about all possible states and conditions and handle them. That requires patience and a certain mindset. If you are not able/willing to be that exhaustive, you will not be able to write general programs. Conceptually you could write programs (or web applications) that have been narrowed to very specific choices of workflows with most of the conditions already taken care of for you.
Creating a website with drag-and-drop tools is not that difficult; until you start to consider: what happens if the user shrinks the window below certain width? What happens if he views the site on a phone? What happens if I have to change the length of a piece of text?
Yes and I am wondering per /indyike's statement "Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code." - what are some examples because the product names mentioned were not made with no/low code.
In the 90s, CASE (computer-automated software engineering) was a big thing. Powerbuilder was huge. Novell had one where you could draw a flowchart and fill in dialogs to make client-server apps... UI builders became common as language vendors added graphical IDEs to their game.
In the 00's we had a lot of visual development tools for websites. Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc...
In the 10's we had Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes.
Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code.