I am biased as I am building a SaaS that take an opposite stance: https://windmill.dev

We should not reinvent programming languages. They have been expertly crafted to be the most powerful and expressive abstractions. Specializing them into DSL is counter-productive: specialized DSLs lack all the nice features of mainstream PL that have been iterated on for many more manhours that could ever be sunk into any startup's DSL. I would argue that the best of both worlds are embedded DSL, but the best embedded DSL are simple libraries that do not require staged meta-programming. Of course, normal libraries provide no-lock in so it has less commercial values.

Most of the benefits of those so called no-code or low-code platform is not in the coding abstraction but in the platforming aspect that makes it easy to deploy and integrate your apps with secrets, schedule and permissions. This is exactly the minimalist approach taken by windmill.

mohanmcgeek

> Most of the benefits of those so called no-code or low-code platform is not in the coding abstraction but in the platforming aspect that makes it easy to deploy

Exactly!

This is what the "serverless" model was supposed to solve but that got hype cycled into something else.

Now the same thing is happening with nocode.

I like the idea behind windmill but I would prefer writing the code in my own ide and checking it into git. Is this possible?

rubenfiszel

Yes you can, and you should! The included versioning is there for simplicity if you do not want the hassle to maintain your own git repo. But the real git will always be more powerful.

There is a github action to automatically deploy from github to windmill: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-gh-action-deploy

That gh action is what I use myself for the public templates that hydrate every workspace on:

https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

Fun fact, the way it works is that it just tarball a subdir of your repo and send it as an input of a normal windmill script that then just extract it to your workspace (for all the diffs that it finds).

Note: It is still a one-man, early startup for now. I am looking for a technical co-founder and applying to YC. The stack is Rust, Svelte and Postgres :)

Note2: I am also looking for early customers and would be happy to customize windmill to your needs if you were to trust us.