This week the Microsoft Build 2021 conference was held for developers, which has become an extremely useful and interesting opportunity to discover some of the firm’s future projects, such as the next generation of Windows, the company’s popular operating system.
In his keynote presentation, current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the use of artificial intelligence to aid programming, enabling a “no code” approach .
This advance would be possible thanks to GPT-3 , the largest linguistic model, capable of generating texts thanks to deep learning, based on a neural network with 175 billion parameters, developed by OpenAI and based on the Transformer model. Thus, this system would be integrated into Microsoft’s Power Apps Studio in order to translate natural language into programming code .
Power Fx, an Excel-inspired code programming language
As Microsoft itself states, it would not be a matter of automatically generating complete programs , at least for now.
It would be a new system that allows generating lines of programming code from a description of the desired action . Then, artificial intelligence (AI) is able to offer different possibilities, leaving the end user to choose the correct one (or the desired one).
The Redmond company would have chosen to associate it with the Power FX programming language , which it launched in March and was created under the inspiration of Microsoft Excel. It would be a “low code” language, which means that it allows the creation of programs with little code.
The company’s goal is to provide more users with the ability to create applications without having to master a programming language , while responding to a growing shortage of developers.
Of course, although users can free themselves from notions related to code (in terms of programming), Microsoft does specify that it will be necessary to fully understand the logic of the application that is being developed .
That is, “the functions do not replace the need for a person to understand the code they are implementing, but are designed to help people who are learning the Power FX programming language to choose appropriate formulas to obtain the result they need” .
So it would be a very useful tool, as it can significantly expand access to building much more advanced applications, and empower people to use low-code tools faster.
Luckily, this system will be available very soon. Microsoft has announced early access starting next June, in just a few days, although for now it will only be available in English for users accessing from North America.
