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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#71

Post by LolWolf »

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.

I’ll add to the list: mathematical modelling, optimization, control, essentially all machine learning, etc.

Except for perhaps optimizers (which some of the best are closed source, e.g. Mosek), the entire rest of the stack is open source.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#72

Post by carlob »

Disclaimer: Wolfram employee here. Opinions here are mine, and not the company's.

Having used the Wolfram Language and Mathematica professionally for over seven years I think this is much cooler than the people who greenlighted this within the company realize. If there is one thing I love about the Wolfram Language is how fast it is to prototype something with it.

Given the scope of the language (or what you call standard library), most things that would require finding some external dependency, then writing some shim, are there out of the box. Whenever I have a weekend project idea it's always very very fast to prototype in the Wolfram Language.

Now, you don't want to use it in production because it's not open-source, fine. This license doesn't even allow that use anyway. But if you want to do a prototype, some MVP for an investor demo, a hackathon, then it's free and it's extremely powerful.

Most of the complaints here are about why you wouldn't build a company on our tech stack or why non-libre software is bad in production, but building production software is not what is being given away here, all the rest is.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#73

Post by superfx »

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?

This may give some sense of what it can do:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#74

Post by georgewfraser »

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 language has a very different syntax that Matlab or really any other programming language, and it has a lot of lisp-like metaprogramming capability. It's not as well thought-out as a proper lisp like Clojure, it's verbose and there's a lot of weird corner cases.

The editor is very different as well: Mathematica pioneered the notebook concept that was copied by Jupyter, and the Mathematica user experience is still much more comprehensive and tightly integrated than anything else.

For linear algebra, they both use Intel MKL under the hood and get exactly the same performance.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#75

Post by opportune »

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…

Most programming languages are open source (or have an open source skin). Most frameworks in any language are open source. As are most commonly used libraries.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#77

Post by pokoleo »

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…

At one time or another, I attended a talk given by wolfram and asked roughly the same question.

His response belittled the question, calling it naive. His smugness was astoundingly tone deaf.

Until he figures out how to answer questions like this without using shame to cow developers into line, I’m staying away.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#78

Post by pron »

superfx wrote: post #73
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?

This may give some sense of what it can do: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/

From what I can tell, the main difference between Wolfram and Matlab/Julia (other than syntax) is a database of various facts. Is that a fair assessment?

Is there a way to access the database without the language?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#80

Post by reikonomusha »

carlob wrote: post #72

Disclaimer: Wolfram employee here. Opinions here are mine, and not the company's. Having used the Wolfram Language and Mathematica professionally for over seven years I think this is much cooler than the people who greenlighted this within the company realize. If there is one thing I love about the Wolfram Language is how fast it is to prototype something with it. Given the scope of the language (or what you call sta…

Anything you, as an employee of Wolfram, create or prototype or whatever with it can have a future. You would have no questions asked. And as an employee I presume you also get the possibility to inspect the source, and perhaps even email the dev teams directly to fix or modify things as you see fit. In such an environment, even simple things like prototyping are great.

Actually, the cases you described, making an investor demo or the like can be argued to be prohibited by the license! Does an investor demo or MVP count as commercial use? I’d say so. Would an MVP potentially produce data that I might use in the production of a “real” system? Likely so. Both of these are expressly prohibited by the license, straight up in the first section.

“Yeah but you’ll get away with it fine.” Will I? I also must respond to Wolfram with a record of my use within 10 days of being asked.

How is this an attractive state of affairs to build anything, even for paltry testing of an idea?

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