Free Wolfram Engine for Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#51

Post by slig » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #46

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram" and so on and I can sort of understand why he might not want that to happen.

Can't they use a more restricted license that prevents that?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#52

Post by enriquto » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #46

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram" and so on and I can sort of understand why he might not want that to happen.

> If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram"

and using an AGPL licence, there would be no danger for them!

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#53

Post by throwawaymath » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #30

alain94040 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care that it's not open source, it's a unique technology. Actual algorithms solving actual problems correctly . None of that fuzzy search that you'd get if you used Google. It's an amazing tool in its domain.

lol it's not unique maxima has existed for ages, maple has very similar fatures

It's not unique in that there literally exist other computer algebra systems (CAS), sure. But it is unique in two meaningful ways:

1. It is arguably the most sophisticated CAS available. Open source tooling has crept up in performance and completeness in recent years, but Mathematica still dwarfs every open source system in performance and feature availability. Competing proprietary systems like Maple are capable of beating Mathematica in certain specific domains (like PDEs), but that leads me to my second point.

2. Mathematica isn't just a CAS. It also supports sophisticated data analysis and ingestion, visualization, (some) machine learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, signal processing, climatology, meteorology, geography, financial analysis, and limited forms of convex optimization.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#54

Post by lootsauce » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

A couple of friction points right now trying to install. One its a 3GB app package on the mac but I guess i'm not surprised based on all that is included, would be interesting to see what, if any, options there are for a modular deployment. But sadly after I signed up for a wolfram account I am unable to activate the install from the terminal :-(

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#55

Post by criley2 » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

>But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain.

Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software.

You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming in general) or you honestly have zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#56

Post by jasonnyberg » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

There is immense value in the amount of knowledge that they've curated and integrated into the system.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#57

Post by enriquto » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #49

Can anyone explain the difference between the Wolfram Language and Matlab/Julia? I understand it has a better story for symbolic mathematics, but how often do people need that? Personally, I've found numeric computation more useful in 99% of the cases; do others have a different experience?

There's much more to math than numeric computation. Many applied mathematicians spend their lives programming and never use a floating point number.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#58

Post by T-A » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

781 wrote: post #40

It doesn't seem to have a notebook interface. Maybe someone can hook this into Jupyter as a Wolfram kernel?

https://www.wolfram.com/notebooks/

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#59

Post by enriquto » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #55

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

>But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software. You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming…

In applied math, data science, statistics, the OP is right: free software is the norm.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#60

Post by ras_west » Tue, May 21, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #3

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…

>Most software is grounded in an open source

That depends on the software development segment. If you are creating 3D games you would expect to build on top of Unity or Unreal because unless you are a major studio building the infrastructure yourself is expensive, slow and not as good. The question is "is computation" such a segment?