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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#131

Post by pron »

enriquto wrote: post #57
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.

I know, but that's not what I asked. The question about numeric vs. symbolic was how common it is for software applications to require symbolic mathematics vs. numerical math.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#132

Post by mhh__ »

dominotw wrote: post #11
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

> - It's arcane/esoteric Even he admits to this , " What Kind of a Thing Is the Wolfram Language? I’ve sometimes found it a bit of a struggle to explain what the Wolfram Language really is." https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/what-weve-built-is-a...

But that's because he's trying to explain how amazing he is rather than actually explain the language usually.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#133

Post by turingbike »

misterman0 wrote: post #12

Just a quick reminder; my MIT licensed open source project Resin [0] does pretty much of what WA does. It's free today and it will be free tomorrow. Free to use in production, to clone, fork, tear apart. Like WA - it's a linguistic engine - it has a query language - there is a cloud you can use [1] if you don't want to host it on-premise - it has high level API's for creating language models from JSON documents (or i…

Regardless of similarity to Wolfram products, this looks cool. I feel like I could be in the target audience, but the documentation is quite sparse. I feel like

> Your data ends up being represented as nodes in a graph that can be traversed by comparing a query (which is also represented as a vector) to nodes from the graph and use their cosine angle as a guide as to what node to traverse to next and when to stop.

Could be... at least a page, with some diagrams. Each node... is a vector? Has a property that is the vector?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#134

Post by reikonomusha »

eigenspace wrote: post #86
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…

Personally, I've found thing since learning Julia I've become pretty distrustful of the whole notion of prototyping in one language and then doing a full implementation in another. It just seems so unnecessary when you have a language where you can start out in a highly interactive state that seems a lot like Python or Matlab but then you can seamlessly start optimizing or generalizing functions and end up with somet…

I feel the same, except with Common Lisp, whose interactivity is maybe only rivaled by Smalltalk, and whose performance can be made close to that of C for real-world applications.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#135

Post by eigenspace »

reikonomusha wrote: post #134
eigenspace wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've found thing since learning Julia I've become pretty distrustful of the whole notion of prototyping in one language and then doing a full implementation in another. It just seems so unnecessary when you have a language where you can start out in a highly interactive state that seems a lot like Python or Matlab but then you can seamlessly start optimizing or generalizing functions and end up with somet…

I feel the same, except with Common Lisp, whose interactivity is maybe only rivaled by Smalltalk, and whose performance can be made close to that of C for real-world applications.

Yes, in fact Common Lisp was what I almost started investing my energy in before Julia. I almost referenced Common Lisp in the parent post alongside Julia but didn't because I never learned it very well and didn't want to speak from ignorance.

My understanding though is that most of the statements I made also apply in CL though my impression at least from the point of view of scientific computation is that Julia's community is more energetic than CL's. Certainly Julia still has lessons to learn from CL though.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#136

Post by gricardo99 »

reikonomusha wrote: post #67
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…

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…

I'm not disagreeing with you, just answering your honest question:

>What programming language stack do you use that’s closed source?

Verilog/System Verilog (generally HDL/FPGA/ASIC design/verification).

Yes, it's a niche (some may even say it's not software, it's hardware, but it is indeed a large code base that requires a software engineering environment/toolchain/practices/etc...). Again, just answering your question for the benefit of the discussion. It would be interesting to hear of others such closed source areas.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#137

Post by ras_west »

jdiez17 wrote: post #107
eigenspace wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that. But what I said was that I'm not clear on what the 'Wolfram Engine' is and what it cannot do. It doesn't seem like a full implementation of the Wolfram Language for free, but I don't actually know. Or is it that it's missing the Mathematica front end but has a full backend kernel implementation?

Yeah, now I understand your question. Reading the blog post made me think it would actually be a full implementation of the Wolfram Language for free. So I was curious and signed up for a developer license. I got to the confirmation page, which helpfully told me to run "WolframScript" to activate the license. But there was no download link, so I googled around and found this[1] page. They seem to only have packages f…

Click the Download button on

https://www.wolfram.com/developer/

Its linked from the article.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#138

Post by eigenspace »

romantype wrote: post #128
eigenspace wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've found thing since learning Julia I've become pretty distrustful of the whole notion of prototyping in one language and then doing a full implementation in another. It just seems so unnecessary when you have a language where you can start out in a highly interactive state that seems a lot like Python or Matlab but then you can seamlessly start optimizing or generalizing functions and end up with somet…

Do you now find that doing both the prototype and full implementation in Julia the better option? Sorry, couldn't figure this out from your comment whether you prefer Julia or some other language for doing the prototype and full implementation. If you can clarify this explicity, it would be helpful.

Apologies for the lack of clarity. Yes, I find I really like using Julia from start to finish and really admire that I can do so without compromise.

I find this approach to be straight up superior to the usual pattern where one starts out in a slow dynamic language to build the prototype and then either replaces certain functions with interop calls to a fast language (losing all the features that brought you to your dynamic language in the first place!) or straight up replacing your entire prototype with a production version written in your fast language and providing bindings to your slow language.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#139

Post by arnoud-buzing »

lootsauce wrote: post #54

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 :-(

Try following these installation instructions for your platform (Mac, Windows, or Linux):

http://support.wolfram.com/kb/45743

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#140

Post by phillipcarter »

eps wrote: post #106
reikonomusha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I am claiming it’s uncommon to use closed source developer tools (compilers, interpreters, standard libraries, etc.). The mere fact that the most popular programming languages in the world are provided as open source implementations is a testament to that. There are some stragglers. I think K is closed source. Commercial implementations of APL are closed source but somewhat popula…

Nearly all professional Windows development has been and still is done in Visual Studio. This alone makes your "uncommon" claim void, and there are other examples outside of the Windows ecosystem equally well-rooted in proprietory tools.

It's worth noting that the Visual Studio umbrella also involves many OSS technologies. If you're writing C# or F# code targeting .NET Core, the language, compilers, libraries, runtime, build tools, and parts of the IDE tooling are all open source.
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