Writing code is at the heart of software and it’s what makes applications like Google, Facebook, and Tinder work. The problem for startups and large enterprises alike is that writing code is a tremendous undertaking, costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. For years, companies have been trying to create code-writing software with limited success.
Appian CEO and founder Matt Calkins says that their code writing platform is a generational improvement that will literally, according to an independent study, enable developers to write code 10-20 times faster because it takes the code writing out of code writing.
Matt Calkins explains how their revolutionary code writing platform works in an interview this morning on Squawk Box:
We Can Write Code 10-20 Times Faster
These days companies compete based on the software they write, that’s how they impress us. As customers, every company has to be more efficient but also more appealing. It used to be just back office and now it’s front office too, now it’s appealing to everybody and differentiating from their competition.
Every company’s got to write a lot of software and they need a faster way. We can write code 10-20 times faster because instead of writing it by lines you draw it like a picture. It’s a flowchart with boxes and arrows and you depict your intentions in the software and then we translate that into code. It’s an interpretation layer, you could think of it as a code already existing but it’s not blocks of code because that wouldn’t be smart.
Built-In Artificial Intelligence
The is absolutely AI in there, but AI is not the translation it’s just an augmentation. AI isn’t smart enough yet to actually write your code. The important thing here is there’s never an authoritative layer that you can go down to and modify. We’re interpreting your instructions, so you express what you want in software and then we interpret that on every mobile device and on any cloud in a scalable way.
You write something in Appian and it’s going to end up being in a native app on your phone. It’s going to be a native app on every phone and every device. Appian is going to translate your intentions that you expressed in a flowchart in drag and drop ways into a piece of software that’ll run on your phone.
What’s Missing in Code Writing is Simplicity
Over the years there have been a lot of attempts to create an easy way to write software and this is the latest generation and I think it’s gone a lot further than the other generations. You can tell that because we’re being run by the biggest organizations in mission-critical ways, unlike these old attempts that kept it simple and weren’t powerful enough to do the top job. We’ve got some of the top firms in almost every industry around the world running multi-million dollar applications on the Appian platform which shows that it’s really industrial strength stuff.
My mission is simplicity, with the organization too, everything about creating code should be simpler in order to allow people to develop more of it and change it faster. I think that’s what’s really missing in code.