Power Fx: open-source now available

My non tech users are still catching up with Power Query.<p>I sort of gave up forwarding news related to low code from MS, as every week there&#x27;s something changing or being deprecated.<p>Moreover, every time I tried to use anything related to the Power Platform (so I could teach to others) I ended up in a world of pain. Is anyone actually using Power Apps, etc... Successfully?

Sigh. I&#x27;m trying but it&#x27;s impossible to decipher anything regarding Microsoft&#x27;s low-code platform.<p>Does anyone know if it&#x27;s possible to run Microsoft&#x27;s low-code platform on premises? Otherwise I don&#x27;t really see the point in having an open-source language.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. I do see the point in having an easily accessible business programming language. I just don&#x27;t see the point in that language being open-source if it&#x27;s tied to a proprietary service which I can&#x27;t host myself.

It’s interesting reading the comments here as I assume everyone here has more coding experience than myself. We have all the Power Apps at my agency and I have yet to find a use case for them. They seem really interesting but until there are good use cases I don’t see this catching on for most users. I’m trying to find some way for this to fit into my work and my employees but even the Microsoft training that I’ve attended doesn’t give much info. I’m sorry but automating notifications isn’t interesting and feels like new ways to micromanage. I feel like for this to thrive is to have good use cases put forth for regular users, then you will get buy in.

A bit disappointing that it&#x27;s only the C# interpreter that has been released and not also the JS version used in Power Apps. Still neat to play with though.

Gives the same feeling I had when I was a teenager and saw Prolog. I instantly had the idea: &quot;Cool! You can even manage a hotel with that and with a few simple queries find which rooms are available and who is where!&quot;. Of course, nobody manages hotels with Prolog.

Great, I installed the Visual Studio for Mac (that I didn&#x27;t know existed) and it immediately froze my Macbook, something that hasn&#x27;t happened to me in recent history.<p>So I guess they really do support the full Microsoft experience on Mac.

I think if low code should take of this is the tool for it, the biggest &quot;low code&quot; tool is excel whit hundreds more excel users than programmers, if not I think probably we over estimate how much people care about develop apps

PL question: Power FX follows the spreadsheet model where a change in one variable propagates and updates all variables that depend on it. I am curious why this model isn&#x27;t more popular. Is it more computationally intensive?

I realize it&#x27;s &quot;low code&quot;, I code, but I cannot see how to play with it locally other than the console&#x2F;REPL example towards the bottom. Will this be available in Excel? Access? Or do I need &#x27;Dataverse&#x27;? I will try the console&#x2F;REPL example.<p>I work at an engineering firm, and we are stuck with Excel forever. I&#x27;ve tried bringing in Pluto notebooks and Julia (compare with Matlab, etc.), SMath Studio (vs. MathCAD), RStudio, Python, WxMaxima, but to no avail. If Power FX is integrated with Excel and Access, I could see it being useful for us.

Reading the comments here I wonder if there can be an opensource project doing the spec implementation, or define a spec for implementation. I can see people frustrated with Power Query or constant changes everywhere.

This is neat but how is it low-code?

In case you want to play around with it, here&#x27;s a Blazor version.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fx.hidekisaito.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fx.hidekisaito.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Natural language support with GPT-3 and no code builders that create Power Fx formulas can lower the bar even further.<p>GPT-3 is not mentioned again in the announcement. What is exactly is it being used for?

I am surprised I have never heard of this...this looks awesome!<p>For anyone who has used this, how does the performance of Power FX compare to a comparably-difficult formula calculation in Excel?

When will they open source something meaningful, like Windows, Office or Edge? Prob don&#x27;t want you to see the telemetry and government spying source code.

Are function names going to be translated as you did with Excel, so that there are a billion macros written in completely different languages?

So is this like embeddable engine? Or standalone server (like Elasticsearch)? Or UI SDK? How about the widgets (e.g for auto-complete)?

Most of the functions I see in Excel are just old BASIC functions. Have they reinvented BASIC?

I am the cofounder of Budibase, and I agree with the many comments here around Microsoft throwing tools at the low-code space and seeing what sticks. The most popular source of users we get are PowerApps users who are fed up with the constant change and moving states.<p>If you are looking for an open source alternative to Powerapps - check out Budibase [1][2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Budibase&#x2F;budibase" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Budibase&#x2F;budibase</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;budibase.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;budibase.com</a><p>I am happy to remove this post, as it is slightly promotional, but I do feel it is very relevant.

Who&#x27;s the user for this? It looks too &quot;dumb&quot; for a &quot;real&quot; programmer, and way too &quot;smart&quot; for everyone else. There&#x27;s no way a real user will be able to navigate that &quot;formula bar&quot;.<p>Source: have observed dozens of regular users through one-way mirror _while at MS_ ~18 years ago. The product later became Dynamics. Users would struggle to find the extremely prominent &quot;OK&quot; button sometimes, or press whichever button was highlighted by default even when they didn&#x27;t mean to. Anything more complicated than that, it&#x27; completely hopeless.<p>Their own user testing probably shows the same thing, and that&#x27;s probably why it&#x27;s open source.

Darn it, every time MS does something like it I feel an urge to get myself a Windows laptop. Gotta control myself.