Could No-Code Be Code Toward a No-Code Programming Language for Citizen Developers

By 2030 for each filled position in Software Engineering, two positions would remain unfilled. This already apparent loss of productivity has the software industry scrambling to fill the missing positions with citizen developers-Technical people with little or no programming skills-who would be using No-Code platforms to program various software solutions in specific domains. However, currently available platforms have fairly limited abstractions, lacking the flexibility of a general purpose programming language. To break the No-Code abstraction barrier, a very simple yet expressive general purpose No-Code programming language might provide citizen developers with an alternative to domain-specific No-Code platforms. Unfortunately, these requirements seem contradictory. Making a language very simple and specific might render it crippled, thus limited to a certain domain of problems. Conversely, making a language very expressive and general, might render it too complicated for citizen developers. In this work we argue that a multi-paradigm minimalist approach can bridge the gap between simplicity and expressiveness by including only abstractions considered intuitive to citizens. As a concrete proof-of-concept, we present a general purpose programming language designed for citizen developers that is on the one hand very powerful and on the other hand very simple. In fact, this language is so simple that the entire development is accomplished by flowcharts using mouse actions only, without typing a single line of code, thus demonstrating a general purpose No-Code programming language candidate for citizen developers.