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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#181

Post by atemerev »

gravypod wrote: post #168
reikonomusha wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also Q [0] and kdb+ [1] as another example. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdb%2B

Kdb is a very niche product that has open source alternatives that are made use of by the rest of the software industry outside of FinTech. It's not bad, it's just not what the market wants to use because it's a closed box. Wikipedia has an article on Time series databases and they contain a short list of popular TSDBs [0]. On that list 11 are libre-software to some degree and 4 are commercial. Relational TSDBs are n…

Unfortunately, there are no open source alternatives to kdb+. Effortlessly handling hundreds of terabytes of data on a single machine, while consisting of only a 300 kB (yes, kilobytes)... Nobody even came close.

Market adoption could be better, but the license costs around $100,000/year (probably the most expensive software per kilobyte). Fintech can afford it, other industries can’t.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#182

Post by veddox »

eigenspace wrote: post #135
reikonomusha wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I get the impression that the communities are different. Not that Julia's is "more energetic" (there's actually quite a bit of activity around CL too), but that it's simply a different crowd. The Julia people seem to me to be coming more from the application side of things - computational scientists who want to do a certain job - while the CL people are more interested in CL as a language, without a specific application field in mind. So although neither of the communities are especially large, the Julia bunch have been more focused on good libraries for scientific computation, which is why their ecosystem is better in that respect. (Also, the "Lisp curse": scientists are more likely to choose Julia as a new language, because it looks more like the languages they already know.)

Source: I do computational biology with Julia, hobby projects in Common Lisp.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#183

Post by szhorvat »

reikonomusha wrote: post #151
brobdingnagians wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have an axe to grind. They have made a very nice ecosystem over the course of 30 years, they are opening it up more. They are proud of "how uniform, elegant and stable a design we’ve been able to maintain across the whole language." It is difficult to get that in an open source project and ecosystem. This has some marvelous qualities that come from its closed source nature. It is special because of that.…

No axe to grind. I’d like to think I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers. I don’t even want to make statements about open vs closed source generally. But as it pertains to developer tools (compilers, interpreters, debuggers, runtimes, standard libraries), open source has been hugely successful, hugely popular, and both individuals and corporations depend on that fact. You’re right, and I think I…

"I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers"

I'm a bit puzzled about how strongly you seem to be feeling about this topic. Given your comments, you seem to be quite far from the target audience of Mathematica. It's not for software engineers. Most productive work done with Mathematica is not "building software" ...

But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#184

Post by szhorvat »

eigenspace wrote: post #69

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.

For practical purposes, nothing. If you have used Mathematica in the past, and know what it is: the "Wolfram Engine" is basically the Mathematica kernel.

Note that this free version only includes the kernel, not the notebook interface. But there is nascent support for Jupyter, so productive use is very much possible.

"I'd expect that many of the things I'm used to doing in Mathematica wouldn't work here"

What's amazing is that this isn't true. There are no _technical_ restrictions. You can't do Manipulate because the notebook interface is no there (or rather: it's there but it's read-only). But all the computational power is available.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#185

Post by veddox »

armitron wrote: post #179
EForEndeavour wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "it doesn't run any Lisp code"? For what it's worth, both Wikipedia and the official Clojure website call Clojure a dialect of Lisp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) , https://clojure.org/ )

Take Lisp code written in the last 50 years and odds are that Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp or Scheme can run it with zero/minimal/moderate modifications. Clojure needs a total and complete rewrite which doesn't only affect the syntax but program logic. Thus Clojure does not run Lisp code. How can it be a Lisp when it does not run Lisp code?

This argument only works if you think of "Lisp" as a single, linearly developing language. It hasn't been that for decades. (That's why they created "Common" Lisp, after all.)

Lisp is a family of languages - within which Scheme and CL are just as syntactically incompatible as CL and Clojure.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#186

Post by badpun »

pron wrote: post #131
enriquto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For anything with an research element, symbolic is huge. On the other hand, if you're just implementing already well-researched algorithms and methods, it's much less needed.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#187

Post by reikonomusha »

gmueckl wrote: post #172
ras_west wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things that Wolfram Language does that maxima doesn't: machine learning, image processing, audio processing, time series analysis, user interface construction, build-in data, geo computation, natural language processing.... Maxima is just a computer algebra system- one small part of what Wolfram does.

Are Maxima's CAS algorithms comparable to Mathematica's? I have tried to used Sage and other systems in the past, but Mathematica has always been better at finding solutions for what I tried to do. But I have never used Maxima for real.

Maxima is a serious CAS and can do serious work, but it’s a few decades behind the latest R&D. It can do algebra and calculus usefully.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#188

Post by gricardo99 »

equalunique wrote: post #173
gricardo99 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questi…

You wouldn't happen to be a commentor/author for this Reddit post[0], would you? Your sentiment here seems quite similar. I have no experience at all with hardware design, but it seems like that domain is especially geared towards closed-source for specific reasons. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/a5pzs5/prediction_ope...

No, that's not me. Interesting points though.

For my comment I was thinking about HDL simulators, which are very expensive/proprietary tools (vendors like Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics), with a lot of vendor lock-in, but yet are based on standard/open languages: Verilog/System Verilog. I know there are some open-source simulators that have been around for a while, but they aren't widely used, and the big 3 EDA vendors still seem to have a strangle hold on the HDL simulator market.

Simulation is generally more important for ASIC hardware than FPGA hardware, since you can quickly iterate on an FPGA design with logic/design fixes, whereas with ASICs design iteration can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#189

Post by szhorvat »

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?

Now you can give it a try easily. Why don't you? Maybe you will discover a new world ;-)

Don't think of Mathematica as a computer algebra system. It is much more than that, fully capable of numerical computation, and just the unique term rewriting programming language makes it worth checking out.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#190

Post by reikonomusha »

szhorvat wrote: post #183
reikonomusha wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No axe to grind. I’d like to think I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers. I don’t even want to make statements about open vs closed source generally. But as it pertains to developer tools (compilers, interpreters, debuggers, runtimes, standard libraries), open source has been hugely successful, hugely popular, and both individuals and corporations depend on that fact. You’re right, and I think I…

"I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers" I'm a bit puzzled about how strongly you seem to be feeling about this topic. Given your comments, you seem to be quite far from the target audience of Mathematica. It's not for software engineers. Most productive work done with Mathematica is not "building software" ... But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all…

I do computer mathematics. I’m the author of a computational group theory package [2], and my day job is in quantum mechanics and quantum computation, but in that I’m building packages in a software engineering capacity. The algebra gets pretty gnarly. Check out a recent paper, which includes both a math [0] and SW [1] component. Perhaps because of this I’m unusually representative of the intersection between math and software.

I hope folks aren’t finding my comments hostile. I have used the Mathematica product before in their GUI and at the command line, and some of my colleagues use it for various calculation tasks. I’ve opted to stick to open source alternatives like Sage, wxMaxima, GAP, and Axiom/Fricas.

The engine doesn’t give you a license to Mathematica, so I don’t presume the target audience is the collection of folks who want to do differential equations with plots. The article emphasizes lots of software things (languages, integrations, etc.), so actually I do believe they’re targeting software engineers.

You should note that I have not criticized their features, but rather restrictions on the use of the product in the first place . Maybe that would be interesting to read, but instead I have commented on the leading question in Wolfram’s article. I have not and will not download their Wolfram engine in its current state though for the reasons I’ve outlined. Do recall that using it means I’m bound to a legal contract, and that’s not one I’m willing to engage with.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10541

[1] https://github.com/rigetti/quilc/blob/master/src/compilers/a...

[2] https://github.com/stylewarning/cl-permutation

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