Google's ChatGPT competitor Bard gained a new skill today: the ability to help us write and debug code in more than 20 different programming languages.

As Paige Bailey, Group Product Manager at Google Research, explains in a blog post(Opens in a new window), "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation."

Bard's programming skills extend to more than 20 languages, including popular languages such as C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Typescript, and even Google Sheets functions. Python code can also be exported to Google Colab without needing to copy-paste it, allowing for easy code execution in your web browser.

If the code produced throws any error messages, Bard will help debug it if you tell the chatbot "this code didn’t work, please fix it." If you don't understand a piece of code, Bard will explain it, and you can ask it to look at specific pieces of code. For example, you could ask Bard to "tell me about the code within the google/jax GitHub repo." And if a piece of code is too slow for your needs, simply ask Bard "Could you please make that code faster?" and it will get to work speeding it up,

Bailey says Bard's code generation, debugging, and explanation ability "is particularly helpful if you’re learning about programming for the first time." However, Google is keen to remind us Bard is still just an early experiment and can produce "inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently."

Anyone worried about the code Bard produces being quoted verbatim from an existing open source project without citing the source can relax. Google says citation will be included if Bard quotes at length from a project.

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