
Introducing Wolfram Alpha Notebook Edition - tosh
https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/09/the-ease-of-wolframalpha-the-power-of-mathematica-introducing-wolframalpha-notebook-edition/
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Postosuchus
It's been a long time since I used Mathematica (I still think it is an
absolutely awesome product even though I'm not a huge fan of the language, to
say the least), so I might not have context. Question to more knowledgeable
people - is this the first sign of the recognition that the rest of the world
is actively contributing to and using Jupyter (compared to proprietary and
non-free Wolfram/Alpha) and a desperate attempt to stave off the eventual
irrelevence?

It does look to me very similar to the SAS situation, where they continue to
exist (and still hold ground in some serious places) but the rest of the world
has long moved on to R and Python, and SAS has completely lost that
generation...

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alok-g
My best understanding is the following:

Given the proprietary model and pricing, they have not seen the adoption they
were hoping for for offerings like Wolfram Cloud. As you mentioned, FOSS
tooling in the meanwhile has been slowly and steadily becoming good enough,
though still far behind the commercial offering from them.

The current release announcement however may not be related to the above.
Wolfram Language has had natural language capabilities for quite some time
now, so the said release seems to be a natural extension.

It's a great product. I just hope they are able to lower the prices
drastically while still hitting their margins via increased sales.

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jmiskovic
First a paragraph about how awesome they are, then some more BS about how they
came to this "revolutionary" idea.

The power of Jupyter is being able to reproduce somebody else's math and then
take it in another direction. It has to be open source to actually work. I
wish the best for Wolfram, but I hope Alpha Notebook won't take off in science
community.

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yummypaint
Wolfram alpha was pretty impressive when it came out, and remains on of the
best ways to do quick back of the envelope estimates. However, the lack of
improvement over the years has been very dissappointing. My subjective
experience has been that capabilities been steadily broken or removed. It used
to be possible to do an ideal gas calculation for example, by just typing
something like "10^10 _(boltzman constant)_ (room temperature)/(1 liter). Good
luck making that work now. They also continue to persist with their nonsense
subscription model where they refuse to sell institutional licenses so they
can ultimately extract more money from students.

Its a shame there arent better open source alternatives yet.

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tplop
Its like a Hollywood pitch. "Hey Wolfram|Alpha is popular, and so are
Mathematica Notebooks, lets make 'Wolfram|Alpha vs Mathematica notebooks' "

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ilaksh
Seems extremely powerful. When exactly is the cloud version coming out?

