Look. Wolfram has had his day. The company has been struggling from a heavily intoxicating ego and work conditions. Should a few recent cases be highlighted. A long term employee committing suicide for instance which could have easily been prevented; lawsuits drama back and forth for something that isn’t even novel.
Allegations that mathematica invented symbol computation. Dude, get real. Also get real about these claims that the front end or notebook was invented by wolfram . Wolfram did not . various other cas systems already had similar things in place noteably MathCaD.
What really makes my stomach turn around is how this person can always add intoxicating little lies on almost everything and given his status, little people like us start believing it . Uggggghh
Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
311–320 of 358 posts
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#312Translation: "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 .
And sagemath.org.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Chisel was used to do Google‘s Coral TPU, although most likely they used commercial simulators as backend.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#314I'm a PhD student, I've always wanted to buy Mathematica because it's cool as fuck but
1. It requires a significant time investment
2. I can't see how it will be in any way useful to me.
Can people using mathematica ( PhDs, pros, mathematicians, engineers... ) tell me what awesome things they do with it ?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#315Can anyone explain the difference between the Wolfram Language and Matlab/Julia? I understand it has a better story for symbolic mathematics, but how often do people need that? Personally, I've found numeric computation more useful in 99% of the cases; do others have a different experience?
> Personally, I've found numeric computation more useful in 99% of the cases; do others have a different experience?
Yes, of course they do. For example, if they want to obtain a general, symbolic, solution to a problem, rather than estimates of particular numerical values. I'm sorry to sound a bit dismissive, but on HN it is common to hear people say stuff like "Oh, I find code much more helpful than math" and it's a bit embarrassing.
Just to give one example out of the entire universe of human mathematical activity, suppose you're doing statistical inference. You've developed a likelihood model for the data-generating process, and now it's time to implement the actual inference, say in a Bayesian MCMC, or a rejection sampler, or importance sampler, or whatever. Those are numerical algorithms of course; but they need to repeatedly evaluate the likelihood function at millions of different points in parameter space. Now, your likelihood function, was developed to model the real world. And perhaps the resulting equations are a little complicated. You may be able to achieve a vast speed-up of your numerical algorithm if you use a symbolic algebra system to find/confirm a symbolic simplification of your likelihood function.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ways around this. I quite like what TimescaleDB have done, with most features OSS, and the more advanced features are under an open source license that permits use for those building a product around it, but preventing TimescaleDB as a service.
A license like that discriminates against fields of endeavour (cloud companies), so it doesn't comply with the open source definition (item 6): https://opensource.org/osd
Then maybe open source definition should update as new ways to exploit it have been found?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram" and using an AGPL licence, there would be no danger for them!
An Affero GPL (AGPL) license wouldn’t prevent AWS or Azure from competing with Wolfram’s cloud service, it would just require that they publish their changes to the source code. They’d still eat Wolfram’s lunch, which is why it won’t happen.
Exactly. That's a good example what's wrong in our world. As long as this won't change we won't get closer to the FOSS world that every human deserves.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#318Earlier 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…
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…
Cadence, Synopsys, mentor, code-meter, muneda and many more
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ways around this. I quite like what TimescaleDB have done, with most features OSS, and the more advanced features are under an open source license that permits use for those building a product around it, but preventing TimescaleDB as a service.
A license like that discriminates against fields of endeavour (cloud companies), so it doesn't comply with the open source definition (item 6): https://opensource.org/osd
Agreed, which is why I specifically didn't refer to the TimescaleDB TSL license as "OSS".
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ways around this. I quite like what TimescaleDB have done, with most features OSS, and the more advanced features are under an open source license that permits use for those building a product around it, but preventing TimescaleDB as a service.
There is no open source license like that.
TimescaleDB's TSL license is not "OSS", but it is open source.
TimescaleDB has a good blog post about why they went this route[0]
I do think that perhaps we need to stop being so snooty about OSS vs open source, and recognise that companies with open source products are allowed to make a profit while preventing the big cloud providers from scalping them.
[0] https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-sourc...