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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#201

Post by garmaine »

jcoffland wrote: post #166
carlob wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some very good points, and you might be right. My educated guess is that this strategy is to get as many people as possible to try this. That would mean letting people do prototypes for commercial purposes too, but not to ship in production. Now, whether that will be enough to keep people hooked so that they use us in production as well depends on a lot of factors, both technical and political. I think your…

I think that what Wolfram is missing is that devs are not interested in getting hooked and then paying subscription fees. The payment model is the problem and devs won't be easily suckered by a free version.

I wouldn’t mind paying a license fee... that wasn’t hundreds or thousands of dollars per user, per core. Wolfram makes Microsoft licensing look cheap.

If Wolfram adopted the Unity model I’d be much more willing to try it out. (free to cheap for hobbyists and small businesses, steep rise in price based on revenue per year)

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#202

Post by kluck »

reikonomusha wrote: post #160
kluck wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

This blog post conflates open source with a community development model.

I never know when they talk about "Wolfram" whether they mean the company or the person. And then I think what an egomaniac one must be in order to name an invention/creation after oneself.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#203

Post by vthriller »

atemerev wrote: post #181
gravypod wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

kdb is frequently described as an in-memory database, or with great emphasis on how efficiently it utilizes a ton of RAM. I've no idea how much does its performance actually drop when the amount of data goes past, say, 2x the amount of available memory, but I'm pretty sure hardly anyone can afford multiple terabytes of RAM in addition to the software license these days…

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#204

Post by atemerev »

JackFr wrote: post #193
atemerev wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'll also end up spending at least that much on consultants. While KDB is remarkable in many ways -- the first time I saw it I thought the demo was fake, the performance so great -- it is very difficult to develop in. They have a an SQLish interface, that allows non-specialists to get work done, but anything serious needs to move beyond that. I haven't used it in a few years, but queries had to be carefully optimiz…

Regarding being append-only — these days, where reactive programming, immutability and FP are all in vogue, this is a feature. As for the rest, yes — K/Q are idiosyncratic, but they are simpler than it looks at first sight (and second.. and fifth). :)

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#205

Post by AsyncAwait »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #110
LolWolf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Neither is the hardware, nor is Intel’s or the Motherboard’s, etc. Would it be ideal? Sure. Is it possible to have every level be completely open source? Maybe, but you’d struggle. I still believe the point is clear, though.

But I'm not so sure it would be ideal. There are things which thrive better as closed source. I prefer closed source IDEs, they tend to be better designed with better long term vision. Most open source projects suffer from a lack of long term vision, tight design, and funding. There are some which do well in those, but not the majority... There are quite a few things that thrive better as closed source which would ha…

> I prefer closed source IDEs, they tend to be better designed with better long term vision.

Like Intellij?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#206

Post by pron »

armitron wrote: post #176
pron wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely tangential, but Clojure is definitely a Lisp, and it does have cons https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/cons

A Clojure cons is something completely different to a Lisp cons. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34347985/clojure-no-cons...

It is not completely different, but rather quite similar [1]. Clojure adds the concept of protocols, which it uses to abstract over cons cells (and it requires that the second element of the cell is an ISeq rather than an arbitrary object).

[1]: You can see the implementation of Clojure's cons cell here: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/clojure-1.9.0/src/jv...

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#207

Post by mhartl »

There’s a link to send him an email, and the address is s.wolfram@wolfram.com. What a strange choice to own lastname.com and then use the email address f.lastname@lastame.com instead of firstname@lastname.com.

Perhaps it’s an issue of standardization inside the organization. In that case, perhaps one might make an exception for the founder & CEO.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#208

Post by nisuni »

romantype wrote: post #118
nisuni wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You replied to a different question, and declared that question nonsense. My question is: do you use Google?

Yes. Now what's your point?

At the question: "Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?" you replied "It’s not open source." It's two comments above this.

No one asked about programming languages or standard library (except you when you misunderstood my question).

Therefore you implied that a good reason not to use a technology is that it's not open source. Literally.

Then why are you using Google?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#209

Post by AshamedCaptain »

romantype wrote: post #112
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…

> you honestly have zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps Are you serious? I don't do web apps. But almost 100% of our stack is based on open source technologies. Python, Twisted, Go, etc. Every single thing we use is open source. It is ironic that you are accusing someone else of having zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps when one could easily think the same thin…

And then you go and quote three examples whose primary use (and for 2 out of 3, their creators and/or creator companies where web developers).

And even most Go software is proprietary, hidden behind Google's bar.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#210

Post by frabcus »

mhh__ wrote: post #123
romantype wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which more restricted open source license would prevent that? There is none!

It can be done. If no license allows you to what you want, get your lawyer/s to draft one for you

"Open source" is generally taken to mean follows the OSI's definition at https://opensource.org/osd

There are other terms for source which is available but proprietary, such as "shared source".

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