I've recently listed to the webinar "Benefits of low code development in embedded systems" by IAR Systems. It turns out that "Low-Code" is the old modeling with code generation. Is that so? What do you guys think about the new "Low-Code" mania?

Not a big fan of the latest buzz-word(s) of the day like "low-code". Auto-generated code says more. Low-code implies a fear of coding and points to non-professionals IMHO.

Yes, to me also the most worrisome is the low-code's promise to "allow users with no formal knowledge of coding or software development to create applications for many purposes". 

Yes, in forty years of embedded development I've seen dozens of similar products come and go. That's because the sales pitch is invariably to upper management that writes the checks, not to the folks actually doing the design. Later--long after the check has been cashed--management always ends up disappointed, but at least they have a nice tax write-off.

What a lot of managers never understand is that you don't pay a software developer to code. You pay a software developer to sit and stare off into space for two weeks thinking about what to code, how, and why, a few days documenting that thought process, and a few hours writing the code. Writing the code itself is the most trivial part of the project.

Interesting. It's the first time I've heard the term "low-code" for modeling and code generation. It could be just an attempt to rebrand something that already exists to sell more tools. 

My opinion is that there are a lot of potential benefits to "low-code", but whether those actually materialize is a completely different matter. For example, in automotive and aerospace development, Matlab tools are used to extensively model system behavior. The capability exists to generate the code and run it on the target.

I often hear about companies having bad experiences with code generation such as bugs they can't debug. Being unable to follow the generated code, etc. When I suggest to people that they use code generation or at least code generation for their configuration files, I often get a lot of pushback.

Personally, I've used modeling and code generation with my projects for at least a decade in certain areas of the code. Configuration files absolutely. State machines, if the complexity warrants it. For configuring driver frameworks, definitely. For my application code .... not a chance in H, E double hockey sticks!

Curious to hear what others think as well.