Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with it being closed-source is that it doesn't form a stable platform for my work. If they decide to change their product in incompatible ways in the future, I'm sunk. I have no recourse, I cannot fix the problem if it goes deep enough, and there are no other implementations. I learned this lesson (albeit from a distance) when Microsoft killed off Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .Net.
I've got no stake in this, but I'll note that from the claims Wolfram has made, they've got a 30 year track record in which notebooks going back to 1.0 still run in the latest version.
Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
241–250 of 358 posts
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
In Lisp cons cells are the basic data type from which lists, trees, cyclic lists, etc. are created,
In Clojure it's not.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#243Disclaimer: 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…
MVP for investor is commercial use.
"You can use it to develop a product for yourself or your company."
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#244Earlier 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/
I personally hate programming in Mathematica, but it is interesting and deserving of an open implementation.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#245Has anyone got anything really cool with the Wolfram language that they've prototyped / seen prototyped elsewhere?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#246Am I the only one who gets tired of, "oh look something free on HN, okay time to shit on it, it's not open source".
All this talk about data-scientists only using open-source is ridiculous. At my university, departments like medicine, biology, chemistry, and life-science make a huge part. The most commonly used programs there are Excel and SPSS. Other departments use Matlab extensively. In finance, SAP is a big player. All of them are closed source and cost money.
Why can't people just appreciate that it is a huge step for Wolfram to release a free version of its kernel and think that this is an opportunity?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only would I not call Clojure a "proper lisp" but since it doesn't run any Lisp code and lacks fundamental Lisp data structures (e.g conses), I wouldn't even call it a Lisp.
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/ )
Chance that it does not work is high.
Now change the code that it runs. Chance that you had to rewrite the code mostly is high.
It's a dialect of Lisp in the sense that it is an incompatible branch / fork with a Java runtime (it's a hosted language) and a bunch of newer functional data structures replacing old-fashioned lower-level stuff from Lisp.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That makes it a no-brainer to use--you pay little or no licensing fees until your game takes off. Unity makes their money off the unpredictable winners, while gifting a nearly free product to the hobbyist and startup ecosystem.
Wolfram Engine is more like the Epic Games (Unreal Engine) model: free to download and play around with, but steep licensing costs before you ship anything. No way to quickly iterate and try things, only paying up when an experiment works out.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#249Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Plus, you can't peer into the layers underneath your software – if I'm writing code in Python or R, everything underneath me is there for inspection, if needed. A closed source solution, where all you have is documentation (potentially flawed), including manually authored change information, just feels archaic at this point.
A lot of people use AWS though, right? It's about trust. Not trust in a "Amazon are good people I trust them" but more like "Amazon incentives are aligned with mine for this project, and I trust that using their platform wont f' me up down the line". Companies should derive that trust factor from other factors based on their unique circumstances. If you are Amazon's competitor for instance it is probably not wise to…
With AWS, you can pack up and go to a different cloud provider, and get the same Linux and the same gcc and the same TCP/IP stack. There's probably some other code you'd have to change, but the essential core is non-proprietary and nobody can take it away from you. Abstracting further, if Linux decided to go in a weird direction, you can get a POSIX-conformant Unix-like OS from other groups, like FreeBSD or Illumos. The Linux codebase can be forked as well, providing an even stronger insurance relative to what happens when some company's or business unit's incentives no longer align with yours.
And that part about aligning incentives is powerful. In the closed-source world, it's also fragile: One company being bought out can shift things tectonically for all of the software that company made. It becomes a treadmill, or a movie routine of constantly jumping from platform to platform as each of them dies off or is pulled out from under you as "corporate synergy" realigns strategic chakras feng shuis your old codebase into worthlessness.