Microsoft’s low-code programming language Power Fx is now open sourced under an MIT license on GitHub repository. The tech giant had open sourced the documentation of the language today with plans to open source the actual source code by 2021 end.
Microsoft officially announced its Power Fx, an open source formula language for low code that’s based on Microsoft Excel in March. This language is said to allow customers of the Power Platform to build and customise application logic. Using formulas that are already familiar to hundreds of millions of users, Power Fx allows a broad range of people to bring skills they already know to low code solutions. Power Fx becomes a common ground for business users and professional developers alike to express logic and solve problems.
Power Fx is said to have the tools a professional expects, including the ability to directly edit apps in text editors like Visual Studio Code and use source control, that enables developers to go faster and find common ground with millions of makers.
Power Fx doesn’t just share the same syntax and functions as Excel, it also behaves in a familiar way. Like Excel, formulas are declarative and recalculate instantly just as a spreadsheet does. Makers have the advantage of telling the app what they want it to do without having to describe the how or when—Power Fx does that for you, freeing developers from the tedious task of keeping variables and data tables up to date manually. With traditional programming languages, it can be challenging to understand all the pieces of code that impact a variable, but with formulas, there is only one way a value is calculated, ensuring everyone is working from the same source of truth.
The project welcomes contributions in agreement to Microsoft’s Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that will allow to leverage contributions in its products.
