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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#321

Post by GordonS »

hoseja wrote: post #316
pabs3 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Agreed, but I think there would be big pushback from OSS proponents - in theory changes like this are diametrically opposed to the "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" tenent.

The problem of big cloud providers ripping off OSS works is a new one, but it is explicitly allowed by OSS licenses - really not sure what a "good" solution is here, but personally I like the route TimescaleDB has gone down.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#322

Post by r_singh »

reikonomusha wrote: post #67
criley2 wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

>What programming language stack do you use that’s closed source?

MATLAB

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#323

Post by pron »

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.

First, in Scheme, vectors are not made of cons cells.

Second, in Clojure, you can certainly make lists, trees etc. from cons cells. It's just that vectors and maps are more common.

Third, Clojure is not only a Lisp (https://clojure.org/about/lisp), but an exceptionally good one at that. I'm amazed that some people find that controversial. I love Scheme and Clojure, and the thought that they're not both Lisps -- something immediately obvious to any long-time Lisper like me -- strikes me as patently bizarre. Clojure is not only a very good Lisp, but celebrated among Lispers for facilitating Lisp's rise in popularity in recent years.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#324

Post by pron »

lispm wrote: post #255
pron wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#325

Post by quickthrower2 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #262
msla wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is more of a commodity, right? You use it for compute and storage and networking, but how much of what you write is intrinsically tied to AWS? With what we're talking about here, there's a language and a bunch of libraries where, if the company decides to change things, your code stops working, and there's no way to make your code work again without rewriting some arbitrary amount of that code. Maybe the company…

> fahre dann mit dem Taxi zu einer Villa am Stadtrand. Ein bedienster steht am Eingang, If you are "seriously" using AWS: A lot. Value of AWS is not that it offers compute nodes. But a full catalogue of further services and tooling APIs and migrating of that can be a big project.

Are you using a translation plugin?

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#326

Post by mgoetzke »

Would love to try it and potentially integrate it. But to be honest the pricing structure is really not clear to me.

The developer page says try it for free and integrate it. Ok. Then it says commercial options for various scenarios exists. Ok. It shows a few scenarios. Ok.

Doesn't show a price though. When searching for prices it suddenly becomes "Find out about full applications" or "Contact Us " ?

Just looking at the dev engine you offer for download. what is the price of that ? What IS Wolfram|One ? What is the difference to the other options ?

Instead of making an easy decision as to whether its worthwhile to use some downloaded tech (which I still have to integrate no less) I have to wade through the page and different products or contact the sales people ? I also don't have any info as to how self-contained the engine is. How self contained is it ? Etc.

I was thinking of integrating WA before but had the same issue. Not something I would just add as a potential feature without making it a larger project with a specific customer in mind to be worth it for me.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#327

Post by Double_a_92 »

danaur wrote: post #268
astura wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What programming language stack do you (and a lot of other developers) use that’s closed source with no realistic open source alternative? Matlab?

There are open source alternatives to Matlab like gnu octave

Matlab lives from all the other toolboxes around it. It's not just the "coding" part.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#328

Post by Insanity »

danaur wrote: post #268
astura wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What programming language stack do you (and a lot of other developers) use that’s closed source with no realistic open source alternative? Matlab?

There are open source alternatives to Matlab like gnu octave

And also Scilab I believe. Though last time I used them, Scilab felt quite inferior to Matlab. (6-7ish years ago)

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#329

Post by hatmatrix »

armitron wrote: post #163
georgewfraser wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram language has a very different syntax that Matlab or really any other programming language, and it has a lot of lisp-like metaprogramming capability. It's not as well thought-out as a proper lisp like Clojure, it's verbose and there's a lot of weird corner cases. The editor is very different as well: Mathematica pioneered the notebook concept that was copied by Jupyter, and the Mathematica user experience is s…

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.

You're about 10 years late to this debate, which has largely been settled.

Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#330

Post by earthboundkid »

pabs3 wrote: post #289
sweeneyrod wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think hardware stuff is an expected exception because there are basically no open-source architectures.

There are at least RISC-V, OpenRISC, MIPS and maybe SPARC: https://riscv.org/ https://openrisc.io/ https://www.mips.com/mipsopen/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#Open_source_implementati...

RISC-V was explicitly created to solve the problem of their being basically no open source architectures, and it's still fairly new, so it really is the exception that proves the rule.
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