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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#291

Post by grepgeek »

r-w wrote: post #275
gmueckl wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. See https://opensource.org/osd

And who put them in charge? :P

The community of free and open source software developers.

Really, with the kind of license proliferation that was going on due to every Tom and Harry that wanted to publish their own license, it was difficult to understand which license was really safe to use and which wasn't. FSF and OSI stepped in to bring some sanity to this situation by categorizing all the free and open source licenses by their permissiveness and restrictions. The majority of the open source development community adopted these licenses.

Any license that restricts making money would neither be considered a free license by FSF nor an open source license by OSI. The license could discourage making money without contributing back to the community and the GPL family of licenses do achieve that to some extent but they cannot outright restrict making money.

The OSD has its roots in Debian Free Software Guidelines which for a long time has been the community standard for what guarantees free software must provide. FSF's four freedoms of free software are also similar. OSD adopted Debian's guidelines to create the open source definition.

If a license does not allow us to run a software how we wish we lose freedom 0 to run the software how we wish. We lose the right to use the software for any field of endeavor. You might want to consider it "open source" because you can still see the source but widely accepted terms like "open source" do not get redefined so easily based on how some people feel about the term. The term's meaning still remains intact due to the meaning it holds for the vast majority of open source software developers.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#292

Post by gricardo99 »

pabs3 wrote: post #279
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…

There are open hardware design tools, some examples: http://iverilog.icarus.com/ https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://github.com/Qucs/ADMS http://www.myhdl.org/ https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ https://wiki.debian.org/FPGA

If you know of any chips taped-out, and shipping in volume, that used any of these as their primary tool, I’d be very interested to know more about that.

I’m aware of chisel used to verify some RISC-V cores that were fabricated, but that’s a research POC, not a volume/production ASIC.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#293

Post by fkwolfram »

Where does this leave us with wolfram clan ?

Wolfram, the company, has not been doing well over the last decade or so. This is a known fact and a lot of advocates of that clan will downvote the bitter truth. This company is after all the most toxic one in good o’l Illinois.

The product is being marginalised slowly but gradually. With real open source and free solutions.

Besides, It’s not a serious solution or fit for anything other than doing some rough calculation or work in an area. If you are an expert in image processing a good chance is that there is some standard open source solution in place that outperforms this closed source solution by a factor of X in terms of speed.

Its usage and importance is greatly overhyped by the company, well almost anything with the name tag wolfram attached is hype to begin with. This might have pulled in the 1980’s and 1990’s but jezz that not where we are at now.

How much of a megalomaniac one has to be clears any suspicion when one looks at its name.

I concede on one point, for the average (low skilled) developer that has no serious background in programming, this might be or THE (only) solution. Then again I doubt how competitive such a developer can stay ...

But for anything mission critical, why on earth would I or for that matter any company rely on a closed source solution ?

Also wary of how much information is send from your end to wolfram . Notice that every 2 weeks ur license will have to be reactivated via a special wolfram server bondage .

All said, not quite. The question remains, why make so much hype about “ oh there so many reasons we won’t open source” and now “ oh , we are so cool , we provide free wolfram “ . Dude make up ur mind in what direction ur business model pivots and then bother us .

It is a known fact that Wolfie thinks of most hackernews users as roaches. This quote is from someone else.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#294

Post by mlevental »

this is interesting. i downloaded it and it works like you'd expect. but really what can you do with this since it's just a repl? are there language bindings somewhere? is there even an easy to write them since you only have repl access?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#295

Post by jonhendry18 »

r-w wrote: post #269
simias wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent goes too far in one direction and you go too far in an other. I work in embedded linux development and my entire toolchain (kernel, userland, compiler, flashing tools, and desktop environment) are 100% open source. I suspect that people who target Windows or Mac OS might be in a different situation but that's to be expected, when you target a closed proprietary environment you end up having to use closed p…

Using a Mac. Can confirm that almost everything that’s actually built upon by other stuff is open-source. Even much of Apple’s development software is open-source.

"Even much of Apple’s development software is open-source."

Not at the GUI level. Xcode and Instruments make use of open source toolchains underneath, but aren't open source themselves, nor are the Apple frameworks they're built on.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#296

Post by mlevental »

educomments wrote: post #222
cs702 wrote: post #117

Translation: "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.

mathematica is already in existential trouble. yes some theoretical physicists supposedly use it (i used it undergrad to do all of the annoying integrals in e&m) but that's such a small market it's basically irrelevant. i can almost guarantee there is no production code running that uses mathematica in some way.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#297

Post by kazinator »

simias wrote: post #194
armitron wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've actually ported some Clojure code to Common Lisp no later than two weeks ago and it was pretty much as straightforward (if not more) as porting R5RS to CL. In my (admittedly limited) experience both CL and Clojure favor a certain high-level coding style with complicated macros versus the more simplistic style of Scheme. Contrast CL's loop construct, Clojure's for statement and Scheme's typically more recursive a…

But C++ in fact isn't true OOP (and neither is Java), and Scheme isn't a functional language.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#299

Post by jonhendry18 »

tonetheman wrote: post #287

I think my block is I am still not sure what it is... I have used Wolfram Alpha and I think that is cool. But the times I have spent looking at the docs... I feel like it is not a programming language exactly. Or not one I am used to or familiar with.

Wolfram Alpha is, I think, a subset geared at being an internet search engine / answer-provider?

Wolfram Engine can apparently access the full set of Mathematica features, just without the Mathematica GUI.

https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-12/

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#300

Post by jonhendry18 »

dmitriid wrote: post #8

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? - It's arcane/esoteric - Its capabilities are largely unknown (I have mixed results with wolframalpha even for simple queries. Perhaps programmatic model is more deterministic) - Its licensing model is murky and needlessly complicated

Wolfram Engine is like command-line Mathematica.

Which means you get access to the full functionality that Mathematica offers, just without the GUI notebook interface.

See: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-12/

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