Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
221–230 of 358 posts
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#222Translation: "We're losing mindshare and customers to open-source alternatives." Great open-source alternatives to Wolfram products can be found in the ecosystems of projects like Jupyter, Scientific Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Julia, to name a few. Major sponsors of such alternatives include Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft. It's hard to compete against that .
If one of those companies decided to drop decent money on turning SciPy+Jupyter (or Julia) into a proper high-performance CAS, Wolfram would be in huge -- maybe existential -- trouble.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#223Okay, 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.
Came here to ask the same question, and even with the answers you've already received, it still seems very murky. If you look on their web site for Mathematica[1] it has several bullet points that includes the Wolfram Engine. One of the other separate points is "Wolfram Algorithmbase"[2], so presumably all those algorithms are not part of the engine and only available if you buy full Mathematica. [1] http://www.wolfr…
Can someone confirm this?
The Algorithmbase is 99.999% of what makes Mathematica useful compared to any language with a decent REPL or notebook setup.
I can't really imagine a use case for the Wolfram Language if I'm not going to use anything listed in http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#224Pricing is opaque.
https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-options/
How can I figure out if it's worth investing the time if it's impossible to price a production license?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Free” also carries meaning outside of the commercial context and specifically in the context of software to English-speaking software developers. If I heard someone talking about software—especially developer software—being free, I personally would assume they mean “libre”, not “gratis”. But I can understand if that’s not universal.
"I personally would assume they mean “libre”, not “gratis”." I don't even know what either of those mean and I've been coding and on HN for years. I'm not even sure how to pronounce the first one. In Australia at least, 'free' means it doesn't cost money.
Free has two standard meanings that are used commonly, "free of charge" (gratis) and "free from restriction" (libre):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
Gratis: "Buy one, get one free."
Libre: "You are free to leave."
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#227Earlier 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.
Ah, you're right! The whole stack is open source if you ignore the non-open-source parts. (Intel compilers are also popular, by the way.)
Look, the point here is to be as open as it is to be practical.
In my lab, we attempt to use as much open source software and parts as is possible without literally spending years waiting for RISC-V to become mainstream along with fully open source GPUs and computing cores, open motherboards, RAMs, etc... this doesn't even include fabrication or other useful software which runs our machines (do you want to have a several-million-dollar photolithography machine running on poorly maintained OSS?). Yes, should that machine be open in a perfect world? Of course, that would be incredible and in the spirit of verifiability. But right now it is not and there is little we can do about it.
It's clearly impossible (or completely and utterly impractical) to pretend that somehow everything can be done in a fully open source way, and it's easy to go down the rabbit hole pretending to be on the high horse of "our stuff is more open." My point is that what can be made with OSS, we almost always attempt to make with OSS, not everything we make is perfectly open and transparent, because it literally cannot be without so much effort as to render the entire thing completely useless.
So, sure we use Mathematica in some things when the OSS alternative is mostly unworkable or unusable, but by and large we attempt to be as open as possible such that people can verify our results without needing to spend thousands of dollars on software whose internals we don't generally know. Do we rely on Intel software and hardware which could have another floating point bug? Sure. But it's hard to be at all productive if you don't at least assume a bare minimum, even if that standard is not completely open.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Isn't that the idea of this announcement? Free to start, pay when you deploy.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#229> 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…
Can you give some examples of industries where the development tools are NOT mostly open source?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to ask the same question, and even with the answers you've already received, it still seems very murky. If you look on their web site for Mathematica[1] it has several bullet points that includes the Wolfram Engine. One of the other separate points is "Wolfram Algorithmbase"[2], so presumably all those algorithms are not part of the engine and only available if you buy full Mathematica. [1] http://www.wolfr…
Can someone confirm this? The Algorithmbase is 99.999% of what makes Mathematica useful compared to any language with a decent REPL or notebook setup. I can't really imagine a use case for the Wolfram Language if I'm not going to use anything listed in http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/
From the article "...with all its computational intelligence, algorithms, knowledgebase, and so on"