In the business world the barrier to entry is often imposed (and for many good and bad reasons) by the IT/OPs/Security teams.
Going to the PHP example, you could pick one of a number of deploy and hosting providers and have your code running and world visible in minutes for less than a Starbucks coffee a week (specific example Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean).
The problem is that even mediocre software developers with a couple years of experience can miss critical things in any language with any framework that can leave them incredibly vulnerable to attack.
For homegrown internal systems, the barrier to entry isn't the code, it's putting it somewhere people can access. In ye olde days you could slap together some VB6 and throw it in an Excel template and have a workable product- but have you ever inherited something like that? I have, multiple times. It's AWFUL- but I also have made a lot of money on not making it awful.
As an engineer, my rapid prototype basically means I eschew some things like a cache layer or performance optimization for just getting the concept out- but at an organization with no real devs, I can see the value in someone who can hack together anything with whatever they have to prove the idea, then calling in the mercenaries like myself to make the concept a real thing. The problem (and expense) usually lies in the fact that they wait until the concept is completely untenable in its current state and everyone is in a panic.
I agree with you largely. I've inherited plenty of unmaintainable code, including a few user-created abominations. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea of end-users writing applications is bad per se, rather, that more effort should go into making it harder for them to shoot themselves in the foot.
I think yes and no. For example, for public web application development the barrier is already low enough that you can put your entire company at risk pretty easily. I think there is little reverence for what it actually means to craft a proper web based application, and that it's not even all about the code, and then there's the never ending maintenance and administration of the server(s).
Now, if you're a spreadsheet jockey and you just need to gather and display your data in a non-trivial way, there are quite a number of things already out there. Business Objects (or whatever it's called now) and Tableau have basically formed large companies upon this idea and there's open source options like Jasper Reports.
I think the days of being able to slap some VB together and write a desktop application are just about completely dead in most situations, which means you really do need a vast breadth of knowledge that a weekend warrior developer didn't need to have a number of years ago.
Going to the PHP example, you could pick one of a number of deploy and hosting providers and have your code running and world visible in minutes for less than a Starbucks coffee a week (specific example Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean).
The problem is that even mediocre software developers with a couple years of experience can miss critical things in any language with any framework that can leave them incredibly vulnerable to attack.
For homegrown internal systems, the barrier to entry isn't the code, it's putting it somewhere people can access. In ye olde days you could slap together some VB6 and throw it in an Excel template and have a workable product- but have you ever inherited something like that? I have, multiple times. It's AWFUL- but I also have made a lot of money on not making it awful.
As an engineer, my rapid prototype basically means I eschew some things like a cache layer or performance optimization for just getting the concept out- but at an organization with no real devs, I can see the value in someone who can hack together anything with whatever they have to prove the idea, then calling in the mercenaries like myself to make the concept a real thing. The problem (and expense) usually lies in the fact that they wait until the concept is completely untenable in its current state and everyone is in a panic.