Kite, the maker of an AI-powered tool that automatically completes lines of code, has added support for 11 new languages beyond Python and JavaScript.
The newly supported languages consist of Java, C, C++, C#, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, Scala, Go, HTML/CSS, and Less. With the 11 new languages, Kite now supports 13 languages. They're almost all among RedMonk's list of the top 20 most popular programming languages[1].
Kite CEO Adam Smith tells ZDNet it will also roll out support for PHP, Ruby and Shell in the next few weeks.
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Kite promises to adapt to a developer's style of coding on the fly and suggest multiple tokens – the equivalent of words – without developers first having to manually define the structure of a 'sentence'.
However, Kite initially only supported Python completions because its former approach required it to build a dedicated semantic engine for each programming language.
To speed up support for JavaScript and other languages[3], last year it turned to natural language processing using OpenAI's GPT-2, a model that is trained to predict the next word based on previous words in a piece of text. It's powerful enough to generate human-like written paragraphs.
Kite then trained its deep-learning model on 22 million open-source JavaScript files to ensure its product worked with JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and the Node.js JavaScript runtime.
Smith says Kite tweaked GPT-2 code with "quite a bit of proprietary ranking and filtering to de-noise the completions shown by Kite".
The idea is to use machine learning to save developers time by offering suggestions to complete a line of code. Microsoft delivers this via IntelliCode[4], a feature of its integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio,