Power Fx: open-source now available(powerapps.microsoft.com) |
Power Fx: open-source now available(powerapps.microsoft.com) |
I sort of gave up forwarding news related to low code from MS, as every week there's something changing or being deprecated.
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?
That might be different this time, though. Afaik it's the first time Microsoft releases a user-friendly reactive language as open source; all their previous tools in this field have been strictly proprietary.
Being open source, it can be maintained by its community of users without becoming abandoned, even if Microsoft loses interest in it.
It is like they took the macro language of Excel into its own app.
Another example I made is to get Microsoft Forms answers that users submitted straight into a SQL Server DB. You literally cannot programmatically get the answers in any other way, by design. Its either logic app component or export to XLSX.
Does anyone know if it's possible to run Microsoft's low-code platform on premises? Otherwise I don't really see the point in having an open-source language.
Don't get me wrong. I do see the point in having an easily accessible business programming language. I just don't see the point in that language being open-source if it's tied to a proprietary service which I can't host myself.
Say you have two departments that need to share data, but their data stores are structured in different ways. You can build an automated process that reads data from the first data pool and converts it into the format needed at the second pool, where the other department can use it.
This is a quite common use case in machine learning for example, where data from numerous different sources need to be stored in a centralized pool ('data lake') where the ML process can analyze it to build predictions.
It feels like they're just throwing out new programming languages for no reason sometimes.
So I guess they really do support the full Microsoft experience on Mac.
It is really hard to work which sheets/rows/columns/cells are dependent of which other which sheets/rows/columns/cells. And that is before we even get to stuff like:
=FLOOR("5/"&DAY(MINUTE(YYYY/38)/2+56)&"/"&YYYY,7)-34
(and much worse)
I work at an engineering firm, and we are stuck with Excel forever. I'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.
GPT-3 is not mentioned again in the announcement. What is exactly is it being used for?
For anyone who has used this, how does the performance of Power FX compare to a comparably-difficult formula calculation in Excel?
If you are looking for an open source alternative to Powerapps - check out Budibase [1][2]
[1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
I am happy to remove this post, as it is slightly promotional, but I do feel it is very relevant.
Powerapps - very reliant on microsoft ecosystem (sharepoint, excel) Powerapps - uses Power fx Powerapps - mostly made for tablet and mobile apps Powerapps - private apps + portal Powerapps - i think powerapps makes use of another Microsoft tool for automation
I feel the components and outputted apps are better within Budibase. PowerApps is more mature than Budibase so it has an ecosystem of consultants
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 "OK" button sometimes, or press whichever button was highlighted by default even when they didn't mean to. Anything more complicated than that, it' completely hopeless.
Their own user testing probably shows the same thing, and that's probably why it's open source.
My Windows boxes usually run about 12 to 14 days between (manual!) reboots, and those reboots are normally done to switch between operating systems.
It's been literally years since Microsoft removed automatic reboots and even updates can be be postponed for several weeks and scheduled at the user's convenience.
There are plenty of bad things about Windows, but tired old stories about "random reboots" or bluescreens just aren't part of it anymore.
That was my first impression (seeing this for the first time today). In an "all built on top of js" world you might just make a snapshot of the entire stack (except for the "browser substitute") part of the document. Make "open new document" essentially the equivalent of github fork from an ever evolving "the empty document" template. You might see quite an impressive reward from moving fast and breaking things instead of sticking to the paradigm of eternal 20th century compatibility.
I noticed the same thing (technical spreadsheet users) and built Wax[0] to make it easier to build apps on top of Google Sheets.
In terms of programming, EasyMorph is basically a high-level functional programming language (but entirely visual) with immutability, pipelining, automatic parallelization and concurrency. It allows arranging loops similar to FOR..NEXT, FOR..EACH, DO..WHILE/UNTIL loops in programming languages. It has subroutines, conditional IF/THEN/ELSE branching, exceptions, mutexes, and a built-in key-value storage.
Besides that, it combines data preparation with no-code automation because it has many so called external actions for exporting to/updating databases, sending low-level HTTP requests to web APIs, performing file operations (download, rename, delete, clone, zip, unzip, etc.), running external applications, and even executing SSH commands on remote machines. The full list of capabilities is rather extensive to list in one post and can be found here: https://easymorph.com/all-integrations.html.
Finally, EasyMorph is just faster due to its in-memory columnar engine with several tiers of data compression and aggressive optimizations that leverage CPU cache. We regularly see customers that switch from PowerQuery because EasyMorph is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.
At the same time, EasyMorph is 5 times less expensive than Alteryx and has a very generous (as our users say) time-unlimited, data volume-unlimited free edition.
We're entirely bootstrapped, profitable, and almost double our revenue every year for the last several years.
A couple more questions: do you have a roadmap for supporting non-windows systems? And also do you have plans for open sourcing any of your code?
Streams maintain the same functional reactive execution paradigm of spreadsheets and property bindings, but you can compose several of them into a new stream with complex conditional logic. You can use the streams as event propagators, and understand the program state as a series of successive updates every time a new event appears on the stream.
https://www.didierboelens.com/2018/08/reactive-programming-s...
A stream allows you to generalice the computation, not depending on the number of data items that were available when you defined the function; i.e. not different from a function with a loop.
Applications like AirTable and other modern outliners are exploring interfaces to model that kind of generalized data tables and relations with visual metaphors.
It happened to me before. I know of three occurrences of this happening to other people in this year alone.
Quick google search:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/316460-how-to-stop-force...
https://superuser.com/questions/957267/how-to-disable-automa...
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/960453-windows-update...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disabl...
It has the benefits of the open source (you can inspect, and modify the code, exists forever, etc), without the downsides (design by commitee - sorry, community -, endless bikeshedding, code churn for the sake of it).
First of all, rebooting outside of active hours and while the machine is idle is the expected and intended behaviour (esp. in Home edition).
Secondly, pushing back updates only works for several weeks - again working as advertised and by no means random.
Inconvenient? Maybe, though I honestly fail to see a scenario in which continuous operation for weeks is absolutely required on a desktop system, but YMMV.
But it's neither "random" nor unexpected in any way. If a properly scheduled reboot of an online machine once a month is unacceptable, then Windows just isn't the right OS for the use case.
Non-technical users don't configure active hours usually. Many are not even aware of this feature.
I'm not sure I would call a feature that can (and does) cause data loss, when user doesn't follow minor update schedule, only inconvenient.
The three cases I mentioned, none were using Home edition. 1st was sister's co-worker that was running some heavy computations of the terrain they were analyzing. He left workstation running over night, expecting to get completed results the next day so he could continue working on it, but system restarted and he lost one day, because he needed to run it again during the work hours. 2nd was a friend writing master's degree. She had all her research documents opened at relevant positions while she was going slowly through the research while writing. She put computer into hibernate mode each night, so she could just resume where she left of next day. Same story, Windows rebooted, closing a few dozen documents. Fortunately, she had her work saved, but she still lost her state/organization of documents and needed to find relevant section of each document again. 3rd was an accountant who was working late and left computer for a few minutes. Again, Windows restarted closing everything. I find current design of updates and active hours very narrow minded. It may seem good in theory, but from my experience, it's bad in practice.
But hey, maybe Windows is not intended for professionals any more. Just home users and gamers.
> Non-technical users don't configure active hours usually. Many are not even aware of this feature.
Ok. Fair enough, but then don't end with this:
> maybe Windows is not intended for professionals any more. Just home users and gamers.
All the anecdotes you provides lack crucial details, such as was the system prompting for restarting after updates, how were updates configured, what was the actual version (19004 21H1, older?), etc. It honestly sounds a lot like some important bits and pieces have been left out.
If you're using the Professional Edition and are worried about data loss because of update-related reboots, configure a proper update schedule and group policies - that's what the Professional edition is for.
You can't come to the conclusion that an OS is not for professionals if you don't actually use the corresponding features and configure it accordingly.
Btw., Windows has a feature that allows apps to auto-reopen and restore their state after a reboot. The fact that most software doesn't support this is not the fault of the OS either.
I don't know all the details and I agree that they could have prevented it, if they had known how to do it. The point of these anecdotes was to show that there seems to be a serious issue with the design of this feature to cause problems this frequently.
Issues IMO are:
- default setting to restart when user is logged in and has applications opened is kind of hostile towards the user as it can lead to data loss (updates are important, but not more important than user's data)
- there is no way to configure this in the Settings app (nor is there any information in Windows Update settings that informs the user about this)
- setting is buried inside group policies. It's hard to find the correct setting without instructions. (and there are a lot of bad instructions online regarding this)
- all things considered, this feels like a dark pattern.
> If you're using the Professional Edition and are worried about data loss because of update-related reboots, configure a proper update schedule and group policies - that's what the Professional edition is for.
Configuration has reset for me once after a feature update. It might have been due to a bug, I'm not sure. Anyway, it happened long ago, under Win 8 Pro I think. Not really relevant anymore.
> Windows has a feature that allows apps to auto-reopen and restore their state after a reboot. The fact that most software doesn't support this is not the fault of the OS either.
The fact that it proceeds with a restart even, if not all running applications support this feature, is the fault of the OS. It's a good feature and hopefully it will gain more support in the future.
Windows updates in general are a convoluted mess that breaks things regularly in unexpected ways (e.g. an update broke Visual Studio's profiler for over a year).
I only don't agree that unexpected restarts are a common occurrence these days, I'm with you w.r.t all other complaints.