To first understand low-code platforms, we must look at James Martin, an information technology consultant. In 1982 he published a book called Application Development Without Programmers. In his book, he stated, “The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future must be put to work at least in part without programmers.”In the 90s’ we saw the birth of fourth-generation programming languages (4GL), computer-assisted software engineering (CASE) tools, and early rapid application development (RAD) tools promising to offload the demand of new applications to users themselves. This stack of technologies failed to disrupt traditional application development for many reasons, including overpromising and under-delivering, not supporting best practices, amplifying security risks, and the invention of the internet. In short, the timing of low-code platforms was off. In fact, the demand for this technology is at an all-time high. Forrester Research expects the market for low-code development platforms to grow from $3.8 billion in 2017 to $21.2 billion in 2022 because of:“The constant increase in demand for software automation and innovative applications, along with the ease of development of web and mobile apps, is expected to have led enterprises of all sizes to adopt the low-code development platform. Moreover, the cloud-based deployment model is gaining high traction in the market, as it requires less capital investment, helps decrease the operational and maintenance costs, and reduces the management's efforts.”So what’s changed? Essentially, the platform. A low-code development platform (LCDP) is software that provides an environment programmers use to create application software through user interfaces instead of traditional computer programming. Additionally, the cloud also provides more security, reliability and faster deployment.
