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Don’t fret, Airplane is far from unique in that.

Using code as the underlying format for low-code/no-code products is common and long-practiced; sometimes editable and exposed to the user, sometimes just to take advantage of existing code/text tooling.

People have been building NCLC systems for decades, but they tend to thrive best when they settle into a specific domain focus.

At that point, nobody outside the domain hears about them and nobody inside the domain even thinks of them in the terminology of “no-code low-code”

If you start squinting though, you can spot them all over the place.



This is what the concept of DSLs are/were...

Famous example, Photoshop. UI that makes complex things seem simple...and a scripting language under the hood which ties into the (incredibly complex) internal operations, for the multitude of things you really can't do in a UI... and instead you get "plugins" with specialized code doing those complex, not possible to generalize in a simple UI, tasks.




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