Low-code/no code/red-lang/spreadsheets etc - I have been thinking about no-code apps etc, the problem of how to make programming more accessible. When it comes to making programming more accessible, one challenge that I see is combining the UI, data store and calculations. It is a challenge to combine these in a way that is accessible to the masses. An example of the challenge is no-code applications. There are many no-code applications that make it easy to edit the UI and data store. They offer an easy to use solution with very little learning. But don't make calculations available. A similar problem with most low-code applications, the calculations part of low code applications is typically not accessible in the way that a spreadsheet is, for example. ... Or there is red-lang, it does a good job of linking UI and calculations, but the data store is, as far as I can tell, a regular external database. ... Or take a spreadsheet, it is good at data storage and calculations, these are both accessible with very little learning, but the UI is a problem, you can't create a regular UI with a spreadsheet, you need to use the grid. Or look at scratch (drag and drop coding) it makes calculations and game style UI available, you can create complex games with it, I was surprised how complex, and it is easy to learn, but does not do data storage or data i/o style UI. .... The hard thing looks to be making UI, data store and calculations work as one. So the calculations can do validation and control writes to the data store. So the calculations are able to produce a responsive UI that guides the user. So the data from the data store is visible and editable in the UI. ... it looks to be a hard problem to make the UI, data store and calculations work together. It can be a challenge to do this in a good programming language, and very hard to create something that is easy for people to learn.

Take a look at Eve: http://witheve.com/

You’ve hit the nail on the head. Every FoC project I’m aware of misses the mark on some combination of UI, storage, or “calculation”.

@Steve Dekorte I assume you mean code reuse. Code reuse is an interesting problem. Thinking about it, it is almost as if code reuse makes the problem hard. e.g. a database is code, a button is code, string search is code. They all tend to exist separately from each other. I suspect some of this is standards for the data. They all have data that goes in/out, they need the right data to work correctly. .... interesting topic, I will think about it.

@Eddy Parkinson I believe you are correct that the core problem holding back reuseability of code is the lack of a general purpose, extendable, data structure standard that allows differing modules to share and add information without disturbing other modules' functions. VB6 surprisingly got very close to this system by having little tables, and you could add fields to existing things. Java allowed you to add properties, and achieves some semblance of extensibility, but its clumsiness made the perusal of data structures (i believe they call it reflection in the Java universe) painful. It is indeed a very interesting topic.

@Eddy Parkinson You've missed one major block: networking! In Onex, I have four major blocks: • ONF - data store, graph, update notification • ONP - P2P networking • ONR - rules language ('calculations' as you say) • ONT - i/o, UI, domain types

@Duncan Cragg Yes, the network does all too often cause a problem. I would include other speed issues as well. I think a lot of this is down to making the user wait, and designing things so user wait time is kept low. .... I suspect we are reaching the stage were automated solutions to this are possible, as looks to be mostly a matter of minimising user wait time.

Eve has no relationship to Red and is not currently being worked on

Sorry I meant "block" of architecture, not something that's "blocking"! 😄