At TOO.software, we tackled the NO-CODE problem from an opposite direction. While the market has been developing graphical tools for specific domains using inflexible building blocks of code, we understood that citizens need the full power of coding. We therefore decided to create a new language that would be simple enough for them.

It’s not anyone’s fault that the market has chosen the mainstream direction; coding is indeed complicated. It has been so despite the enormous investment in programming languages. In the past 70 years, thousands of books and scientific papers have been written, and hundreds of languages have been developed. Notably, on average, one in five Turing Award citations attributes a direct contribution to programming languages.

One notable exception was the Go language. One of the goals of Go was to make it simple. The three inventors agreed – each had the right to veto new features. This kept Go about 2 times smaller compared to Java and C++ which were used at that time, and this was achieved by 3 superb engineers, one a Turing prize winner — Ken Thompson — the inventor of Unix. In a talk titled “Simplicity is complicated”, Rob Pike explains the many complications they had in making simple language.

It was therefore an esteemed scientific challenge to create a language accessible to citizens and powerful enough to make a notable difference from current NO-CODE tools. TOO meets this challenge — a powerful language that stands alongside other strong GPLs, yet is simple enough for citizens to use. TOO is about 10 times smaller than Go, and so simple that it enables coding without typing a single line of code, hence termed: NO-CODE programming language.