Comment by jongjong

The problem with simple silver bullet solutions is that the best ones can handle maybe 80% of reasonable requirements... But it's absolutely impossible to solve any problem which happens to fall in the remaining 20% of problems. This fact is as true as ever and yet marketing of silver bullets is at an all-time high.

I teach an introductory coding course and I was surprised when one student asked me to give them some reasons why learning to code is useful instead of just using a platform like Wix. A similar question came up again (concerning a different website-building platform) in a different discussion with a family member.

I was kind of shocked that the distinction between a website and a data-driven application seems to have faded out of many people's consciousness. I'm guessing that you can probably add dynamic widgets to Wix and other similar platforms which make it seem like you can build complete apps but they can rarely get you all the way to your goal for a long-term project... And when you hit that wall, you almost need to learn the entire field of computer science from scratch just to get that last 10% of requirements implemented. You go from not having to know anything at all so literally understanding everything about computer science just to get the last 10%; or hire someone (and hope that they have the skills you need).