There's a new book out on Claude Shannon the Bell Labs (where else?) engineer who invented digital communication technology. He was the one to realise the power of binary notation which still underlies all, yes all, computer technology. It's a good read and has made me realise I completely omitted him from The Programmer's Odyssey! Something for edition 2.0 perhaps.
The Programmer's Odyssey mentions many religious wars from IT history and they still go on to this day. This time it's about getting rid of C/C++. What next! It seems like an opportune moment to repeat the old C joke - it's the only high level language in which you write more lines of code than if you'd used assembler.
Search the research group Forrester's web site for 'low code' and you'll get over 1,500 hits, for a fairly typical news item on the same topic click here. It's the latest buzz phrase but how new is it? We've had RAD development and Agile development and now apparently 'low code' development. In reality it's the continuation of several trends identified in my book - the front-end/back-end split, the proliferation of APIs and the victory of the SOA architecture. Low code development is all about front end apps using APIs to access business critical services provided by back end applications. It has been pointed out repeatedly that most of those business critical services are written in traditi
