Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 358 posts

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#251

Post by halirutan »

Gormisdomai wrote: post #212

Has anyone got anything really cool with the Wolfram language that they've prototyped / seen prototyped elsewhere?

No prototype, but you might want to look at

https://rulebasedintegration.org/

It's a package for solving symbolic integrals that outperforms many systems. It has an extensive test-suite of over 72,000 integration problems and I encourage you to try how many of them can be solved by SymPy or Julia. Spoiler: I already helped porting it to Symja and if the python community can solve the problems with MatchPy, the port to SymPy can be finished as well.

Disclaimer: I'm one of its developers

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#252

Post by new4thaccount »

garmaine wrote: post #195
reikonomusha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those are still mostly scientific domains, and science has been rooted in open source. Most mechanical and civil engineering, on the other hand, is done in Matlab scripts and proprietary simulation frameworks. Matlab is Wolfram’s chief competitor, not Julia, R, or Sage.

Yea, AutoCAD is huge for Civil Engineers and Matlab is also pretty big for many engineering students, academics, and research professionals. I think most of the heavier users in industry used it all through grad school and then brought it over into industry. Most of us engineers that just have a bachelor's degree weren't as firmly rooted in Matlab and just picked up Python as our first post academic language. Both are good. Matlab has some advantages like bundling suitesparse (world class linear algebra subroutines)and handling the license of that so you don't have to get one yourself (assuming you want to sell your product).

I think Python definitely wins as a scripting language lingua franca though. It is free as in beer, open-source, available on any OS I care about, and most of the software I use has a built-in Python API.

Mathematica is big in academic math and physics programs, but I haven't seen it in industry as much as Matlab. Believe it or not, my company had a major accounting application written in Mathematica, so it does pop up in weird places.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#253

Post by new4thaccount »

LolWolf wrote: post #71
enriquto wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In applied math, data science, statistics, the OP is right: free software is the norm.

I’ll add to the list: mathematical modelling, optimization, control, essentially all machine learning, etc. Except for perhaps optimizers (which some of the best are closed source, e.g. Mosek), the entire rest of the stack is open source.

Yea, I was going to say that many solvers are closed-source and incredibly expensive and have very restrictive licenses (basically all the good ones).

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#254

Post by iamwil »

reikonomusha wrote: post #190
szhorvat wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 an…

No, your comments have been rather measured, and I applaud you for it.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#255

Post by lispm »

pron wrote: post #78
superfx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may give some sense of what it can do: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/

From what I can tell, the main difference between Wolfram and Matlab/Julia (other than syntax) is a database of various facts. Is that a fair assessment? Is there a way to access the database without the language?

It's based on rewriting symbolic terms (similar to Lisp's s-expressions) using rules.

It then originally has a large library of facts and rules for a large amount of mathematical domains. This has been expanded over time into lots of knowledge about the world (physics, biology, astronomy, ...).

Programming is often done with multimedia-rich notebooks.

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/entity/Planet.htm...

So it's some kind of knowledge-based system for mathematical related domains,

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#256

Post by daveguy »

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...

That is an interesting post. I think there are two other potential ways FPGA tools could become open source:

1) If there are some widely used open hardware devices or open standards. The fact that FPGAs are proprietary designs and can't be copied is a significant barrier. If there was an analogue of ARM in the FPGA world that could open up open source dev tools too.

2) DIY FPGA. This one is almost certainly much further down the road than any of the other options. But if fab and design tools of the chips themselves become a commodity then there will be open source dev tools. It used to be pretty difficult to make a custom PCB, but now with PCB as a service open tools are seeing more use. I think the reason this is so far down the line is because fpga offers cutting edge performance for specialized applications. If you wait several generations or are ok with reduced performance then you can stick with generic CPU/GPU. With Moore's law running down there may be more and more things that aren't possible without fpga. And I don't think it would be until then that open source dev tools follow more diy fpga.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#257

Post by new4thaccount »

Spivak wrote: post #109
kgwgk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathworks' revenue is $1bn, it has doubled in the last decade. Someone may be using Matlab.

A ridiculously large number of people use Matlab as a tool. I can't think of a single engineer that doesn't curse its name regularly but I've yet to encounter any actual applications written in it. It's Excel for engineers.

I think this often happens anytime there is a large amount of legacy software written by folks that had software has a tertiary skill on their tool belt.

The Matlab IDE is not bad though and is a lot like Python's Spyder IDE. Also, a lot of Matlab commands have fully browsable source provided I've been told.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#258

Post by [deleted] »

lispm wrote: post #242
pron wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

(cons 1 2) is doing what in Clojure? In Lisp cons cells are the basic data type from which lists, trees, cyclic lists, etc. are created, In Clojure it's not.

[deleted]

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#259

Post by t0astbread »

halirutan wrote: post #246
demarq wrote: post #88

Am 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".

No, you're not. It's tiresome, especially when people comment who obviously never had to solve hard integrals or pde's to even come up with a model which can then be implemented in an algorithm. I'm absolutely stunned how short-sighted many of the commenters are. I use Mathematica daily and, still, I appreciate Julia, Python, R. All this talk about data-scientists only using open-source is ridiculous. At my universit…

If no one ever criticized restrictions, we wouldn't have the freedom we have today.

Most people here are complaining about the license, not the software. They think the software is good but the license is holding it down. To me this looks like valuable feedback.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#260

Post by lispm »

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…

Julia is influenced by the Common Lisp Object System. But it made it fast for numerical computing. So there is a Julia lesson for CLOS...

http://p-cos.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-lispers-first-impression...

Post reply on HN