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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#61

Post by enriquto »

jasonnyberg wrote: post #56
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.

And it will be a shame that mankind loses this immense value once the company inevitably disappears.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#63

Post by kmill »

dmitriid wrote: post #8

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? - It's arcane/esoteric - Its capabilities are largely unknown (I have mixed results with wolframalpha even for simple queries. Perhaps programmatic model is more deterministic) - Its licensing model is murky and needlessly complicated

I use my university Mathematica license rather than use WolframAlpha because I can never figure out exactly what the latter can do. Wolfram Language, in contrast, has ok enough documentation and a predictable programming model. (It's not perfect---I have a long list of complaints about its design---but it seems to be the best for the kinds of symbolic calculations I'm doing right now.)

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#64

Post by ras_west »

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?

Wolfram supports numeric computation too (optimization, PDE solvers, data science etc

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#65

Post by WorldMaker »

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 Wolfram is correct in how game changing the Wolfram Language, Engine, et al are, then commoditizing it to the point that there is an "Azure Wolfram" stack and an "AWS Wolfram" stack may be vindication. (Maybe not very profitable vindication, but real bonafide "people are using it and happy with it" vindication.)

Azure and AWS already have competing stacks to Wolfram, it is just various and sometimes incompatible hodgepodges of R, Python, Jupyter, and so on and so forth.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#67

Post by reikonomusha »

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…

I’m open to being wrong, but my domain is not and has not been web apps. It’s mostly been things like satellite antenna control software, quantum computers, scientific computing, and AI. Each of those domains, in my experience, has been firmly grounded in open source. (It does not mean, of course, that the end product is open source.) I recognize there are some domains that are steeped in closed source solutions with closed source developer tooling with no viable alternatives, but IME—as limited as it may be—it’s uncommon.

What programming language stack do you (and a lot of other developers) use that’s closed source with no realistic open source alternative? It’s not C, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Lisp, Fortran, C++, PHP, Perl, Go, SQL, Rust, Objective-C, or Swift? (All of these, of course, not only have industrial strength FOSS implementations, but the first or second most popular implementation is the FOSS one.)

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#68

Post by nfoz »

enriquto wrote: post #59
criley2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Really depends which niche you're in. Matlab for example is also a major player.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#69

Post by eigenspace »

Okay, so I read the post and I'm still not clear on what the actual difference is between Mathematica and the Wolfram Engine. Does anyone have any insight here?

Presumably this isn't intended to cannibalize Mathematica sales so I'd expect that many of the things I'm used to doing in Mathematica wouldn't work here but I don't really see any discussion of what it can't do.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#70

Post by reikonomusha »

enriquto wrote: post #48
alanbernstein wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain which features are similar? I am not an expert, but I suspect you are discounting some significant features of Wolfram.

Computing symbolic derivatives and integrals, simplifying algebraic expressions, arithmetic with arbitrary length integers, solving simple ODE, computing limits and series, things like that.

Maxima is a fine piece of software, and I’m a huge proponent of its development, but doesn’t compete in the breadth or depth of Mathematica (or Maple) at all.
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