| Paradigm | Low-code, general-purpose, imperative, strongly typed, declarative, functional |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Vijay Mital, Robin Abraham, Shon Katzenberger, Darryl Rubin |
| Developer | Microsoft |
| First appeared | 2021 |
| Typing discipline | strong |
| License | MIT License |
| Website | docs |
| Influenced by | |
| Excel functions, Excel macros, Pascal, Mathematica, Miranda | |
Microsoft Power Fx is a free and open source low-code, general-purpose programming language for expressing logic across the Microsoft Power Platform.[1][2]
It was first announced at Ignite 2021 and the specification was released in March 2021.[3][4] It is based on spreadsheet-like formulas to make it accessible to large numbers of people.[5] It was also influenced by programming languages and tools like Pascal, Mathematica, and Miranda.[6]
As Microsoft describes the language, it heavily borrows from the spreadsheet paradigm. In a spreadsheet, cells can contain formulas referring to the contents of other cells; if the user changes the content of a cell, the values of all its dependent cells are automatically updated. In a similar fashion, the properties of components in a Power Fx program are connected by formulas (whose syntax is very reminiscent of Excel) and their values are automatically updated if changes occur. For instance, a simple formula may connect a component's color property to the value of a slider component; if the user moves the slider, the color changes.[7]
Power Fx was developed by a Microsoft team led by Vijay Mital, Robin Abraham, Shon Katzenberger and Darryl Rubin.[7][6] Power Fx is available as Open-source software.[8] The source code was shared under MIT license by Microsoft on November 2. 2021.[9] Only the documentation was originally open source.[10]
