I tried couple of no-code apps, but found them inflexible –not really giving you the opportunity to dive-in and customize.
I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you just have to write single endpoints for custom business logic, like "send a welcome email on sign-up" or "process a payment".
It has a database viewer, but it's not the core of the product, so I use Forest Admin to autogenerate an Admin Dashboard that non-technical team members can use:
With these two, you can point-and-click make 80% of a SaaS product in almost no time.
I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate Hasura + Forest Admin, for anyone interested:
http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh
For interacting with Hasura from a client, you can autogenerate fully-typed & documented query components in your framework of choice using GraphQL Code Generator:
https://graphql-code-generator.com/
Then I usually throw Metabase in there as a self-hosted Business Intelligence platform for non-technical people to use as well, and PostHog for analytics:
All of these all Docker Containers, so you can have them running locally or deployed in minutes.
This stack is absurdly powerful and productive.
Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps similar to Forest) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours.
This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql
Here's a reference application I put together: https://github.com/cpursley/react-admin-low-code
And we're taking a step further and using Elixir to listen to Postgres table changes for an "Event" style architecture: https://medium.com/hackernoon/get-notified-of-user-signups-a...
Thanks to gavinray also for the help with this!
For anyone looking for a self-hosted solution that can be more easily whitelabeled, highly recommend cpursley's work.
You should pop by the server chat more often =D
Getting as far as you can modelling a new problem domain with just models.py and the Django admin is pretty fun.
Metabase was a game changer in my last company, it was so nice to just be able to drop a 50+ line custom SQL query in there with parameters and let users pull what they want. We'd also setup queries to be loaded via Google Sheets cron jobs. That enabled live dashboards most any spreadsheet user could create (pivot, lookups, transforms, etc.).
I'm always scared to call when I hear this.
The idea is for most users to be on the free / open tier and then monetize off of enterprise users with specific demands and less cash sensitivity.
"The pricing depends on your team/org: what features you’re using Hasura and the uptime/response SLA that you need. If you have something running with Hasura already feel free to setup a chat with the team to get a sense of the pricing. However we will have something launching for self-serve style pricing soon for a managed HA / auto-scalable Hasura with Pro features."
I believe it's priced on a per-feature basis, so they're likely to work with you depending on what your particular needs are.
When we were looking to extend our spreadsheet functions that read/write to/from databases, we considered integrating Hasura as a backend.
Commendable work by the Hasura team, I think really worth checking out what they've done.
-
[1] Caveat: founder of MintData (https://mintdata.com) here, where we read/write from databases both directly via our flow editor and via spreadsheet functions which wrap things like Hasura.
Have you tried it / do you have comparison points? I only poked around in Hasura a bit before deciding it wasn't worth the switching cost atm, but the out of the box upserts are compelling to me.
Graphile (https://www.graphile.org/) seems to be very similar, although I discovered it just a week ago (also on HN), and haven't had a chance to explore it yet.
In that case, you'd just build the front-end as usual, but use Hasura to bang out your whole backend and then autogenerate the type-safe query components with graphql-code-generator.
When I do products myself, I typically pick a pre-made template/UI kit (Vue is my preference) and then just modify it from there to suit my needs.
TailwindUI also looks really nice and I've seen several people build beautiful looking UI's with it for smaller SaaS products in a few days (though given that they're familiar with TailwindCSS and have a knack for this type of thing already):
Hasura also has a lot of community examples for different front-ends. Ranging from web apps in React/Vue/Angular/Elm to mobile clients in Flutter or Android/iOS:
They have several dozen example apps built in all sorts of tech here:
https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/communi...
That sounds kinda nifty, but does it then allow you to write custom code to add business logic? Glancing through the documentation, that part wasn't clear to me.
While it CAN expose an existing Postgres database, where it really shines (in my opinion) is when you're starting a brand new product. Because you can create your whole database and all the relationships, foreign-keys, triggers, permissions, etc through the web console UI incredibly rapidly.
And yeah, it takes care of all CRUD and provides an aggregation/statistics API (sum, median, standard deviation, count, mean, variance, etc), and it leaves the pieces of custom business logic up to you to write. It's entirely agnostic to what you use to write these, so long as they expose an HTTP endpoint.
Yes! Like gavinray said, you can create HTTP services in any language of your choice. Hasura can then be configured to call HTTP endpoints when something changes in the DB. And your services can call Hasura anytime of course.
Remember that Hasura handles all the authorization for you, so there's no need to "proxy" requests made to it.
You end up writing very little compared to traditional frameworks.
Firebase does provide unlimited password logins for free, which mitigated my personal concerns about Auth0. The advantages of a SaaS auth provider compared to a roll-your-own have been documented elsewhere, and I personally found them compelling.
What are the reasons you 'don't like' something like Auth0?
https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ultimate-starter/tree/m...
The sign-up Action bcrypt hashes the password and saves it by sending a mutation to Hasura, and the login Action queries for the user by their email and tries to bcrypt compare their password against the stored one and then return a spec-compliant token if they match.
It's fairly simple to implement your own Auth in Hasura, you just need to return a signed JWT that matches the spec:
https://hasura.io/docs/1.0/graphql/manual/auth/authenticatio...
I have a starter kit that includes a ton of stuff including pre-made JWT auth configured as Hasura Actions, a standard monolith-style Node REST API skeleton, and OpenFaaS serverless handler examples in every major language (Node, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, C#, PHP) you can find here:
https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ultimate-starter
And really comprehensive docs about setup and architecture + how everything works here:
Hasura connects to a read replicas and manages connection pooling across the database cluster.
Hasura itself is stateless so it doesn't do the database replication.
Here's a 3 minute demo video: https://cdn.tryretool.com/videos/4_minute_demo_4827ae.mp4
It's something we started working on a few years ago before low-code was a thing, haha. It's funny to see what you work on become a buzzword, haha. If any of you have any thoughts / feedback, please let me know! (HN, honestly, has been the main source of feedback for us as we've been working on it.)
Java is lo-code compared to say C++ which was the main option for enterprise software before Java came out. You had VBA in Excel for decades.
I was playing with it last month and whipped up a simple "toy" (calling it a "game" is too much) that lets me fly a little space ship around a little asteroid field. It took about a day to get it working enough to be fun. (I polished it up a little after that, and maybe one day I'll add some actual game play, mine an asteroid, whatever.)
https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/SpaceGame
While I used GDScript there's a node & pipe dataflow visual UI that non-programmers can use to construct "code", so I think it counts as low-code. You can modify your objects to "export" member vars to the UI so you can tweak them with widgets.
If I had to e.g. design and deploy a 3D world for VR users I would seriously consider Godot as a front-end IDE.
(BTW, I also made a fun knock-down-the-tower toy I call Yengapult: https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/Yengapult )
I’ve made a complete platformer game with my kid with the drag and drop mode in a weekend (5 levels, high score system, power ups, custom animations, the works) then exported it as a proper Windows installable game.
(Godot has the same basic principles but w/o the indefinite power of c# as modern and widely used programming language)
https://love2d.org/ - LÖVE is an awesome framework for building 2d games (and it's cross platform!).
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/logic-apps/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/understanding-serverl...
I used it plus a Google sheet as the first version of a UI for the last company I worked at. Instead of waiting for our front-end folks to finish up the UI, I just pointed a logic app at it, ran some basic logic on it, and brought it into the system whenever it was changed, and imported the data into the main data stores.
But Mule's skyrocketing costs are forcing our hand. If we don't finish this transfer project within the year, we'll be charged $100,000 for another year of Mule -- an absolutely unfeasible cost for our small/medium sized nonprofit. Our preliminary cost analysis for Azure showed it would be a fairly tiny fraction of that. So off we go.
I bring this up because we have settled on mostly Logic Apps with a few Azure Functions here and there as necessary, to fill in for missing connectors. So we are in a pretty good position to directly compare the two platforms against each other.
So far, my personal judgment is that Mule offers a lot more whizbang, but we weren't using nearly enough of it to justify the bananas cost, and LAs are turning out to be just fine. Mule development work happens within something called Anypoint Studio, which is (I believe) built on Eclipse. Most of the work you do tends to be done in the visual editor, just like in LAs, but you can drop down into the XML as necessary. It provides a fairly good debugger, and has one benefit of being able to be tested locally. I could fire up a flow in debug mode, pop over to an ActiveMQ admin panel on my machine, fire off a message, and watch it hit breakpoints. Mule's also able to provide a more consistent ability to validate JSON against schemas; LAs appear to only really be able to do this at the trigger point. That's relatively minor, though.
Mule's visual editor has no problem with large (sometimes too large) flows, with multiple branching paths, and then sub-branching on top of that. The visual elements themselves have a certain polish to them as well, and don't take up too much space -- they're represented as square instead of wide rectangles.
In comparison, the Logic Apps design view feels rather clunky. It's clearly been designed to encourage small concise flows rather than large ones. We've reimplemented complex flows that felt fairly manageable in Mule, but feel rather unwieldy in LAs despite being essentially 1-to-1 translations.
But LAs do have some honest advantages besides price. A big one is being able to easily drop in a custom Azure Function as a processor. This provides some easy reusability for more complex tasks; we had to write a Function to create JWTs, but now can reuse that in every LA where we need it. Additionally, having everything there in the Azure portal is valuable. There is essentially no gap between working on a flow, and releasing it. Azure provides the run history for your app right in the panel, which essentially acts as a set of visual logs for past runs.
We are kind of struggling with figuring out how to integrate LAs with our source control, but my guess is we'll figure that out with enough experience. All said, I think MuleSoft offers a ton of advantages that very large enterprises would find highly valuable; there's the whole Anypoint Platform that I haven't even discussed here - API managers, access control, etc. But everything that our smallish organization has needed, we've found alternatives in LAs or in the wider Azure ecosystem.
- https://platform.deloitte.com.au/articles/preparing-azure-lo...
- https://www.feval.ca/posts/logicapp-ci/
- https://blog.thenetw.org/2019/08/20/logic-app-in-a-multi-ten...
- https://www.bruttin.com/2017/06/13/deploy-logic-app-with-arm...
It was a real hassle to get everything somewhat nicely through CI/CD (and it's still not at the level where I'd like it), but getting them in source control and having them deployed through an Azure DevOps' release pipeline has been immensely valuable.
Let me know if you have any more questions about that as I'm happy to help you get going!
Can't you use ARM templates or Azure CLI for deploying them?
Here's an early draft:
"The Low-Code Ecosystem" https://blog.remaketheweb.com/low-code-frameworks-for-buildi...
I think there's _a ton_ of amazing tools being developed in this area right now. I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop!
[0] Remake (https://remaketheweb.com/) — Build web apps with only HTML.
You might also add Quickbase and Knack to that same section. They are pretty popular.
edit: one more - quasar, that is vue with lot of wiring already done.
https://app.refinery.io/import?q=9lvohdvqd50g
This project will:
- Run every hour (via timer)
- Grab URLs from a Google Sheet
- Go screenshot all of the URLs
- Write each screenshot to an S3 bucket
- Email you at the end after the jobs finish
There is more I could do with this (like trigger an email if something fails, etc). But at least does what you describe above in a (hopefully) succinct fashion!
Also, shill alert as I'm an author for this service (but this was a fun project to build over a few minutes, so thank you).
No, it has a REST API; you need Apps Script if you want automation within Sheets, but you can interact with Sheets without it.
https://github.com/daptin/daptin
My overall goal in Daptin (the name comes from adaptable) is to build something reliable which can run for years without needing any maintenance.
As for the features, I will try to list some here:
- YAML/JSON based data declaration
- CRUD API implementing https://jsonapi.org/
- GraphQL API
- Definable actions, for custom APIs
- Integration to any 3rd party API based on Swagger/OpenAPI spec
- Runs on mysql/postgres/sqlite
For more advance features:
- SMTP server, IMAP server
- Self generated certificates/ Acme TLS generation support
- Encrypted columns
- Asset columns (file/image/binary store)
- Asset columns backed by cloud storage (like ftp/disk/gdrive/s3/bb and many)
- Native OAuth/3rd party login support
- Exposing cloud store folders as static websites
We use https://retool.com
Honorable mention to my own startup https://flatfile.io if you're trying to skip past the data import problem.
I've clicked through all of their product overviews and I still don't have a clear understanding of what it is.
If it just launched -- have you actually used it enough to get value out of it? The whole point seems to be that it evolves (??) as a company grows but like I said I don't fully get it still.
Darklang is a proprietary framework where the ENTIRE stack... even the IDE! is controlled by a specific company. Just be weary of this, when depending on it.
"so specifically to lock-in: right now, no one concerned about lock-in is going to have a good experience on dark. We don’t have the resources to address that need, but at some point we will be in a company position to deal with the lock-in question. Our plan is to give you tools and resources to move off Dark if you want to"
To make it work, you have to write all the code! However, you _don't_ have to worry about provisioning databases, deploying, etc, etc, etc.
Makes it really satisfying as a learning to build something and have it be live without getting stuck in heroku / mongodb / etc hell.
It's got simplified editors for tiles, sprites, maps, music, sound and code, runs on desktops + raspberry pis, and can export to web. The code you write is lua, with builtins for all the editable resources, and paves over most, if not all, the technical rabbit holes you can get yourself into with game development.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/keyboard-ma...
Add syntax highlighting and GTM
Also real deployment previews and sharing between sites
Switched to Netlify, much happier
Storyscript: https://storyscript.com (private beta) Iris: https://youtu.be/3VZZbKoXDVM (mostly research, OSS on GH) MS Power BI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com (enterprise)
For building websites, Webflow is powerful (and allows for fine-tuning).
Among utilities, Parabola (a kind of no-code extract, transform, load tool) is very neat.
For getting data/creating APIs without having to code I've built Simplescraper - https://simplescraper.io.
Currently working on an integration for Airtable that allows you to create a dynamic CMS using any data source, without code. Hopefully useful to non-dev and lazy-dev alike.
If you're not on Twitter, we hope to submit the integration by the end of this month so check us out then.
On the no-code side I really like http://carrd.co
a) thank you for carrd.co, it's something I've been looking for
b) I don't exactly understand what is the use-case for divjoy. It looks like it helps me ship a landing page really quickly? Why do you need React integrated with this?
Perhaps there's a use case for React devs that I am missing?
I can tell you that what I want is carrd.co, but without vendor lock-in. I want carrd right now to launch a beautiful email-collection landing page and do market validation. However, if the market test is successful and I want to transform the homepage into a "sign up now", I don't feel like I can do that with carrd and I would need to hire someone to re-create a landing page with a similar look and feel. So I'd like a "carrd" without the vendor lockin.
[edit: More on carrd, according to their TOS they get unlimited rights to all your content?!?!]
That said, this is a very early version. I'm launching database integration next week (data fetching logic/caching, full REST API, etc) and then Stripe integration shortly after that. So in not too long, you'll be able to export a fully functioning SaaS app.
So I'd like a "carrd" without the vendor lockin
Long-term this is exactly what I'm going for. Build something simple inside the Divjoy editor, host it with me, export your codebase at any time for full flexibility. You never need to worry about lockin.
It is low code AND capable of full serverside JS for handling interesting cases. And it has hundreds of plugins for handling APIs of all sorts.
Then again, that’s not really low code.
It's how I started coding, as a teenage visual artist, and now I'm a fullstack dev with a fondness for FP and SmallTalk. The gateway drug effect is real.
BTW, egow here. Spot of trouble with my password on that login name.
Perhaps it steps out of low code into zero code. But you do end up needing to a developer to get far in bubble.io
Source of insight: building a few webapps for people in it.
-- we're in private beta but I can prioritize invites for anyone asking themselves this same question. It's pretty much what we're here to solve.
It’s a drag and drop form builder that saves as JSON schema. You can export and use in your own app, or submit to our backend and send Webhooks to an automation service like zapier.
I use it in my client projects since I frequently need to customize form fields, then I can reuse them across clients.
It doesn't use Google Sheets, and instead has its own spreadsheet + Sketch-like surface, giving you tight control over design and behavior that I haven't seen in other tools.
It would honestly warm my heart to see something that has more power & simplicity in the same tool, because I've been a die-hard fan of app-dev tooling for the past 19 years.
Would be curious to get people's thoughts here on MintData -- do you guys agree with my assessment above?
--
[1] Founder here. We built MintData into the tool I've always wanted and thought was missing. Our inspiration was Visual Basic 6, PowerBuilder, and all the RAD (rapid app-dev) tooling from the 1990s.
The idea started from there and now includes more flexibility in terms of integrations, customization of data displays, and the ability to compose actions.
I've been working for a few months now in this project and I'm hoping to publish the first beta version here soon. If this sounds interesting or useful to you or someone else, I'll be happy to hear about it, so feel free to DM me here or contact me at hello.oneadm@gmail.com
All that follows is my personal opinion; I do work for Esri but I'm not speaking for them here.
A lot of the modern ArcGIS stack is based on feature services hosted on ArcGIS Online (Esri's cloud service). Feature Services combine a SQL database with a REST API and spatial analysis. They're particularly useful if you want to store spatial data and put it on a map, but it works with non-spatial data, including relational data, as well.
Once data is in a feature service, you can visualize it in 2D or 3D maps, add data to it with off-the-shelf apps (we have Survey123 for surveys, Collector for field data collection, and QuickCapture for rapid data entry). You can build stories around the data with StoryMaps, data-driven websites with Hub, and dashboards with Operations Dashboard.
If the field apps aren't enough, you can create custom web apps with web app builder, custom native apps (Qt) with AppStudio, or totally custom apps with the developer APIs.
We even have open source apps [2] that demonstrate how to use the platform for common scenarios, like indoor routing, data collection, and taking data offline.
Sorry if this comes off salesy, I just really like sharing this stuff since I think ArcGIS tends to go under-utilized outside of GIS circles. The developers site [3] has a lot of info about the platform and a link to sign up - there's a generous free tier if you want to try it.
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
It's surprising powerful and the built in sprite editor can do some pretty neat stuff.
Our marketing website cycles have gotten so much shorter with Webflow. Even though it's just replacing HTML/CSS/JS for marketing sites, the direct design and publish access in a way that's intuitive and reliable saves us time directly on the marketing site (0 dev time now) and frees up dev to focus on more interesting things. We've gone from design -> develop -> commit/publish, to design + publish in one nice tool.
Disclaimer: am founder. :)
Have a look at the Encore Playground [2] to see a real-world example.
Is it? I'm pretty certain I am not the only programmer who has never heard the term before. What is this super trendy thing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platfor...
The main use for it so far is as a way to send push notifications to my phone with a call to a simple POST endpoint.
It lets you build and deploy applications super, super quickly on top of AWS Lambda. You build applications by composing high-level building blocks, which are small business logic units and are chained together on a visual graph of your application.
The cool this is that you can re-use "code blocks" across projects and they follow the same input/output rules (plain JSON) so you can mix + match languages in a single project. If you want to make an API endpoint, you just add an API Endpoint block, wire that to a code block, then wire that to a response. Easy. Same with Cron jobs -- you just link a timer to a code block and you're good.
Logs are handled in the UI for you so you don't have to muck with AWS at all (the deployment to AWS is effectively an implementation detail that you don't have to know about). Pricing is the same as AWS (usage based) -- we just add a surcharge as a flat percentage.
It started out as a side project to solve a similar frustration to the ones you're describing, and it's snowballed from there (I'm a co-author of Refinery). :P
It's still fairly early (and we're adding big features still). Feedback is welcome!
Some examples:
- List of demo apps https://refinery.io/discover
- Map/reduce using fan-out transitions https://docs.refinery.io/tutorials/fan-out-fan-in/
- Docs on the different Block types https://docs.refinery.io/blocks/
The Serverless Framework have been an amazing low code experience for me.
Building REST APIs is crazy simple... 90% of it is writing config files. Another plus is that you really don't need to use web frameworks - you can just write your business logic.
anyway thats my $0.02
It's great for engineering teams that want to add custom HTTP services, hook into GraphQL mutations, and/or add custom SQL - but want to empower non devs, lazy devs or simply devs that want to focus on their core product. We started working on Internal after realizing that most companies can't dedicate valuable engineering time to build and constantly maintain/upgrade their internal tools.
I've led engineering teams from seed to series C companies (10 - 50+ people) for several years. Maintenance and permissioning are always the biggest problems when it comes to building these tools yourself, so we've built Internal with these things in mind by focusing on how startups actually go from zero to one and then scale beyond that.
When you use Internal, we offer a CRUD tool with fine grained permissions, auditability and controls to get you started. In my experience, most startups use open source software for this or build it themselves. Both of these approaches reach their limits very quickly in terms of quality and maintainability and lead to tons of issues when trying to pass audits down the line.
With respect to flexibility, it's there when you need it. We offer a feature called Spaces for when you need to customize the UI and build tools quickly, but we do this in a way that keeps you from shooting yourself in the foot. You can build Spaces without SQL or javascript knowledge and you can quickly create useful tools without needing to know how to code. If you need additional customization after that, we allow you to hook into existing business logic via http services or graphql endpoints and expose that to the end-user as "functions" which can be consumed when configuring a Space. We also offer several out-of-the-box integrations including Salesforce and Stripe so you can quickly integrate with existing services with little to no effort.
Let me know if you would like to talk or want a demo. You can also just sign up and try it out yourself.
https://devscore.com https://github.com/devscoreInc https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClgE-uFdQIJ2GWhaNjz6WRw/vid...
The good thing about appsmith is it comes with self-hosted version. For data-conscious companies, it's the perfect solution.
Developers can collaboratively build internal tools and publish them.
The vast library of UI components on appsmith gives you enough flexibility to build the apps the way you want them with simple drag and drops.
You can build your internal apps by connecting APIs as well as databases. I personally like the API support as it gives me control over input validations and flexibility to add business logic as well.
M-x list-packagesWe started just a few months ago, but are already getting very good feedback from our customers.
BTW, we just released a CLI to make local development easier, check out the companion blog post here https://nhost.io/blog/announcing-nhosts-cli.
If you try it out let me know what you think: https://www.easycsv.io/
1) What happens if someone tries to upload a non-CSV file? What do you do?
2) What happens if the data is malformed or not in the right format or there are no headers at the top of the file?
3) How many steps does it take for someone to get from the uploading step to the final step? How do you make this easier?
https://community.hitachivantara.com/s/article/data-integrat...
So basically there are APIs that provide various data points related to countries and other stats. I need a front-end that could consume the APIs and render data in form of tables, charts and cards.
What are my options here that can set me up and running quickly?
I find everything else just incomplete.
> Saasify handles all of the SaaS boilerplate, including user accounts, subscription billing, developer docs, and a polished marketing site.
Start off with a one pager with an email form and analytics.
In one click add an SEO optimised blog.
Also don't need to worry about hosting, upgrades etc we handle all that for you.
https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Datasette aims to reduce the gap between "I have some data" and "I have a useful JSON API for it" as much as possible. I think it does this really well.
A timely example: the first version of this API for interacting with data about the COVID-19 pandemic took me just a few minutes to build AND deploy: https://covid-19.datasettes.com/ - it uses data pulled hourly from https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 and https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data
Here's JSON for the number of reported cases and deaths in California (served with a CORS header so you can call it from other pages): https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid/ny_times_us_states.jso...
And here's data showing the number of NEW cases per day reported in Italy, using a SQL window function. First as a graph visualization: https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid?sql=with+italy+as+%28%...
And here's that raw data as JSON:
https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid.json?sql=with+italy+as...
And as CSV: https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid.csv?sql=with+italy+as+...
https://covidathon.devpost.com/
(Also love the Commodore reference)
Click "remix" on that page, drag-and-drop in a CSV file and you get an instant API for it.
You can try it out without even signing up for a Glitch account!
Served me well for creating basic website, blogging and form :)
So-called "low code" tools involve code, you just write it by rat-wrestling instead of typing. And good luck using those tools effectively for problems their designers didn't anticipate.
With Lisp, you write less code and it's easier and more fun to write.