
Free Wolfram Engine for Developers - GWOLF
https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/launching-today-free-wolfram-engine-for-developers/
======
reikonomusha
> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?

It’s not open source.

Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product
with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build
something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a
“production license” as soon as it becomes useful.

Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or
whatever he calls his entire enterprise now) must be proprietary and paid-for
in order to exist. Maybe it’s true; all of the successful and wildly popular
computer algebra systems are closed source. (wxMaxima is rough to use, Axiom
has 3 or 4 different forks, each with fewer than 10 developers, SymPy just
isn’t there, Sage is absolutely wonderful but not polished or easy to deploy,
...) 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. There _is_ a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had
been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s.

I think Wolfram needs to think quite hard about how he wants to get his
technology in the hands of developers while maintaining a business. Not that
my opinion matters, but if he can manage to do it by open sourcing Wolfram
Language, Wolfram Engine, or something like that, while keeping his business
intact, I might again consider him to be the genius he was lauded to be in his
20s.

~~~
criley2
>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 in general) or you honestly have zero concept of what programming
looks like outside of web apps.

~~~
reikonomusha
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 closed source developer tooling with
no viable alternatives, but IME—as limited as it may be—it’s uncommon.

What programming language stack do you (and a lot of other developers) use
that’s closed source with no realistic open source alternative? It’s not C,
Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Lisp, Fortran, C++, PHP, Perl, Go, SQL, Rust,
Objective-C, or Swift? (All of these, of course, not only have industrial
strength FOSS implementations, but the first or second most popular
implementation _is_ the FOSS one.)

~~~
gricardo99
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 question
for the benefit of the discussion. It would be interesting to hear of others
such closed source areas.

~~~
equalunique
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/a5pzs5/prediction_open_source_fpga_tools_will_not/)

~~~
daveguy
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.

~~~
pabs3
There are open FPGA synthesis tools, SymbiFlow/IceStorm for example:

[https://symbiflow.github.io/](https://symbiflow.github.io/)

There is an open FPGA hardware implementation:

[https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA](https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA)
[https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-4...](https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43.html)

More resources:

[https://wiki.debian.org/FPGA](https://wiki.debian.org/FPGA)

------
carlob
Disclaimer: Wolfram employee here. Opinions here are mine, and not the
company's.

Having used the Wolfram Language and Mathematica professionally for over seven
years I think this is much cooler than the people who greenlighted this within
the company realize. If there is one thing I love about the Wolfram Language
is how fast it is to prototype something with it.

Given the scope of the language (or what you call standard library), most
things that would require finding some external dependency, then writing some
shim, are there out of the box. Whenever I have a weekend project idea it's
always very very fast to prototype in the Wolfram Language.

Now, you don't want to use it in production because it's not open-source,
fine. This license doesn't even allow that use anyway. But if you want to do a
prototype, some MVP for an investor demo, a hackathon, then it's free and it's
extremely powerful.

Most of the complaints here are about why you wouldn't build a company on our
tech stack or why non-libre software is bad in production, but building
production software is not what is being given away here, all the rest is.

~~~
eigenspace
Personally, I've found thing since learning Julia I've become pretty
distrustful of the whole notion of prototyping in one language and then doing
a full implementation in another.

It just seems so unnecessary when you have a language where you can start out
in a highly interactive state that seems a lot like Python or Matlab but then
you can seamlessly start optimizing or generalizing functions and end up with
something that runs basically as fast as C but retains all the dynamic
advantages from the prototyping phase.

Yes, Julia's namespace isn't as polluted as Mathematica's is and I think
that's a good thing. It's got an amazingly vibrant package ecosystem and
packages are treated on such a first class level that as soon as you load a
(well made) package, it composes so well with everything else, including other
packages that it feels built in. I've never really felt like I was 'writing
some shim' to utilize code from a julia package.

~~~
reikonomusha
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.

~~~
eigenspace
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 community is more energetic than CL's. Certainly Julia still
has lessons to learn from CL though.

~~~
veddox
I get the impression that the communities are different. Not that Julia's is
"more energetic" (there's actually quite a bit of activity around CL too), but
that it's simply a different crowd. The Julia people seem to me to be coming
more from the application side of things - computational scientists who want
to do a certain job - while the CL people are more interested in CL as a
language, without a specific application field in mind. So although neither of
the communities are especially large, the Julia bunch have been more focused
on good libraries for scientific computation, which is why their ecosystem is
better in that respect. (Also, the "Lisp curse": scientists are more likely to
choose Julia as a new language, because it looks more like the languages they
already know.)

Source: I do computational biology with Julia, hobby projects in Common Lisp.

~~~
eigenspace
True, if I was more careful I’d say Julia’s scientific / numerical community
is more energetic. I definitely don’t want to sound like I’m dissing CL as I
have great respect for it and want to be better acquainted one day.

------
AlbertoGP
Sounds reasonable, although I think this term in the license will discourage
many people:

“Audit

You will maintain accurate records of Your use of the Free Engine sufficient
to show compliance with these Terms and Conditions, and Wolfram will have the
right to audit such records to confirm compliance therewith. Upon written
notice of an audit from Wolfram, You shall respond within ten (10) business
days.”

[https://www.wolfram.com/legal/terms/wolfram-
engine.html](https://www.wolfram.com/legal/terms/wolfram-engine.html)

~~~
reikonomusha
> Open-source projects approved by Wolfram.

“You can’t use this free thing to make other actually free things.”

~~~
dmitriid
Isn't that a common thing for commercial products that are provided for free
to students, open source projects, non-profit organisations etc.? You have to
prove that you're going to use it for what the license allows.

~~~
reikonomusha
Perhaps I’m being a stickler for language, but I don’t consider it “free for
open source projects” if I have to contact them to get permission to use it in
an open source project. My beef is that the word “free” is being thrown around
in this article. They should say something more true, like “we provide this
engine for experimental personal use at no charge, and if you want to use it
for something serious (open source, your company, etc.) contact us for a
license.”

~~~
Crinus
Free means no charge for the vast majority of people who can understand
English.

~~~
reikonomusha
“Free” also carries meaning outside of the commercial context and specifically
in the context of software to English-speaking software developers. If I heard
someone talking about software—especially developer software—being free, I
personally would assume they mean “libre”, not “gratis”. But I can understand
if that’s not universal.

~~~
ClassyJacket
"I personally would assume they mean “libre”, not “gratis”."

I don't even know what either of those mean and I've been coding and on HN for
years. I'm not even sure how to pronounce the first one. In Australia at
least, 'free' means it doesn't cost money.

~~~
commoner
Free has two standard meanings that are used commonly, "free of charge"
(gratis) and "free from restriction" (libre):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre)

Gratis: "Buy one, get one free."

Libre: "You are free to leave."

------
cs702
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_.

~~~
educomments
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.

~~~
mlevental
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.

------
Jeff_Brown
If you're making software to sell, the licensing problems are real, but if all
you're doing is quantitative investigation, WL is like a dream.

When I was a grad student in economics, we had to solve really, really long
algebra problems as homework. I used Mathematica to see if I was doing the
right thing, getting more feedback, and more personalized feedback, earlier
than anyone who had to wait for the next class.

------
eigenspace
Okay, so I read the post and I'm still not clear on what the actual difference
is between Mathematica and the Wolfram Engine. Does anyone have any insight
here?

Presumably this isn't intended to cannibalize Mathematica sales so I'd expect
that many of the things I'm used to doing in Mathematica wouldn't work here
but I don't really see any discussion of what it _can 't_ do.

~~~
tux1968
Came here to ask the same question, and even with the answers you've already
received, it still seems very murky.

If you look on their web site for Mathematica[1] it has several bullet points
that includes the Wolfram Engine. One of the other separate points is "Wolfram
Algorithmbase"[2], so presumably all those algorithms are not part of the
engine and only available if you buy full Mathematica.

[1] [http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/)

[2]
[http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/](http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/)

~~~
educomments
Can someone confirm this?

The Algorithmbase is 99.999% of what makes Mathematica useful compared to any
language with a decent REPL or notebook setup.

I can't really imagine a use case for the Wolfram Language if I'm not going to
use anything listed in
[http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/](http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/)

~~~
ras_west
From the article "...with all its computational intelligence, algorithms,
knowledgebase, and so on"

~~~
tux1968
But the "its" that the article is referring to is the Wolfram Engine. It
doesn't say that is all the algorithms in Mathematica. And the Mathematica
website lists Algorithm Base and Wolfram Engine as two separate line items,
which is at least surprising if one is contained in the other.

I actually believe the Algorithm Base is probably included, but it's
definitely anything but clear from the website or any of the press release.
The Mathematica website makes them seem like two completely separate
unconnected components.

It's really unclear what is included in Wolfram Engine and what is included
only in Mathematica... the above was just one obvious example. It would be
very nice to have a concise list.

------
argd678
I think the adoption would be better if they had a Community Edition like
JetBrains does. It’s trickier with their products though since their main
market is academic, but there may will be “enterprise” features that can be
added to make it worthwhile for a University to buy licenses and individuals
to not have to. It’s a great piece of technology I wish I had been able to
play with starting as a child along side BASIC.

------
demarq
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".

~~~
halirutan
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 university, departments like medicine, biology, chemistry, and life-science
make a huge part. The most commonly used programs there are Excel and SPSS.
Other departments use Matlab extensively. In finance, SAP is a big player. All
of them are closed source and cost money.

Why can't people just appreciate that it is a huge step for Wolfram to release
a free version of its kernel and think that this is an opportunity?

~~~
t0astbread
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.

~~~
demarq
I see what youre saying but

> They think the software is good but the license is holding it down

The issue I'm really trying to point out is

They think the software is _cost free_ but the license is holding it down

Wolfram Engine has always been good, but it seems people are more in a huff
because it's priced free but not open source.

I.e expecting that if something is given to you at no cost, it also must be
open sourced.

~~~
t0astbread
Hmm, I see what you mean. I'm under the impression that this isn't the main
issue people are having here but what do I know.

One other reason why people might be so upset here is the naming of this
product. "Free" is commonly used to describe libre software. This is at best
an oversight by the marketing team and at worst deliberately set up to deceive
developers.

------
eggxbox8
FYI: After downloading and installing a 3GB executable, the software needs to
be activated with a developer ID. Knowing that could've saved me the trouble.

------
szhorvat
There's lots of ideological discussion here. I would have loved to read some
experiences based on _actually trying the thing_!

You don't have to settle for the command line. It works with Jupyter, which
seems to be the most pleasant way to use it.

------
pron
Can 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?

~~~
georgewfraser
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
still much more comprehensive and tightly integrated than anything else.

For linear algebra, they both use Intel MKL under the hood and get exactly the
same performance.

~~~
armitron
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.

~~~
EForEndeavour
What do you mean by "it doesn't run any Lisp code"?

For what it's worth, both Wikipedia and the official Clojure website call
Clojure a dialect of Lisp
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_\(programming_language\)),
[https://clojure.org/](https://clojure.org/))

~~~
armitron
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?

~~~
simias
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 approach to iteration.

You're welcome to draw the line wherever you want, maybe for you conses are
mandatory in a Lisp language but I don't really understand what you hope to
gain from this discussion. I might as well say "tail call optimization is
absolutely mandatory in any self-respecting Lisp, therefore CL isn't a proper
Lisp dialect".

This is effectively the same level of discussion as a Java programmer saying
that C++ isn't "true OOP" or an Haskell enthusiast claiming that Scheme isn't
a true functional language because it allows side-effects. It's just silly
gatekeeping that doesn't lead anywhere interesting.

~~~
lispm
The chance that you can port code without actually rewriting it is pretty
slim. But then, people have been rewriting Lisp code to run in C++.

If you want TCO in CL then use one of the dozen implementations which supports
it.

People btw. used to write some non-trivial code which ran in both Scheme and
CL with the help of a Scheme on top CL, a compatibility layer or a translator.
But that's now relatively rare.

------
udqbpn
There are some projects trying to do an open source version of some of Wolfram
Mathematica [https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-
ther...](https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-
open-source-implementation-of-mathematica-the-language)

------
abc_lisper
This is very nice. I just tried it with Jupyter and it works.
[https://imgur.com/VoHXMtS](https://imgur.com/VoHXMtS)

You can also write a inline script.
[https://pastebin.com/TYWfS3gk](https://pastebin.com/TYWfS3gk)

Is there a limitation of running only one kernel per machine? I had an
instance of wolframscript running, and when I ran a script file, I got this
error:

> ./test.wl

Connection closed by WolframKernel. This generally means the product is
unregistered.

~~~
new4thaccount
Yea I honestly don't fully understand how many cores my commercial license
uses, but every now and then it tells me that I need to register my license
when it is already registered. After some digging, I figured out that I could
only have 4 instances open at a time and sometimes Windows would keep one
running in the background which would be 5, so I would have to close it out in
the task manager and it would then work again. This made me sad.

------
ftcHn
Pricing is opaque.

[https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-
options/](https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-options/)

How can I figure out if it's worth investing the time if it's impossible to
price a production license?

~~~
educomments
Just ask.

Warning: it's ridiculously expensive. You need to be charging your users 4+
figures per license for your software in order to be able to pay Wolfram their
cut.

The open/libre stuff is a huge red herring -- cost is the real bottleneck. It
doesn't make any sense to use Wolfram/Mathematica unless there's a built-in
function that you NEED, for which there is no alternative, and which requires
a team of PhDs to re-implement.

E.g., even a non-production single user corporate desktop license is $3K.

------
cahotswh
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

------
JustFinishedBSG
I'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 ?

------
jonhendry18
Seems like a great way to take advantage of this would be to use Mathematica
(and its GUI) on a Raspberry Pi to explore and figure out how to do what you
want to do, but then actually run it in Wolfram Engine on a more powerful
computer.

------
dmitriid
> 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

~~~
dominotw
> \- It's arcane/esoteric

Even he admits to this ,

" What Kind of a Thing Is the Wolfram Language? I’ve sometimes found it a bit
of a struggle to explain what the Wolfram Language really is."

[https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/what-weve-built-
is-a...](https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/what-weve-built-is-a-
computational-language-and-thats-very-important/)

~~~
mhh__
But that's because he's trying to explain how amazing he is rather than
actually explain the language usually.

------
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.

------
lootsauce
A couple of friction points right now trying to install. One its a 3GB app
package on the mac but I guess i'm not surprised based on all that is
included, would be interesting to see what, if any, options there are for a
modular deployment. But sadly after I signed up for a wolfram account I am
unable to activate the install from the terminal :-(

~~~
arnoud-buzing
Try following these installation instructions for your platform (Mac, Windows,
or Linux):

[http://support.wolfram.com/kb/45743](http://support.wolfram.com/kb/45743)

~~~
gdelfino01
All good until step 17. I get this error: "(7) Unable to connect". It is
probably the proxy... How can I change the setting for it?

------
mhartl
There’s a link to send him an email, and the address is s.wolfram@wolfram.com.
What a strange choice to own lastname.com and then use the email address
f.lastname@lastame.com instead of firstname@lastname.com.

Perhaps it’s an issue of standardization inside the organization. In that
case, perhaps one might make an exception for the founder & CEO.

------
nutjob2
"Free for Developers" is misleading, since you can't distribute it with your
software for free, or modify it, which is generally what developers want to
do. It's essentially a trial.

~~~
jonhendry18
Plenty of developers do things for their own use without even thinking about
releasing.

------
daniellerommel
Disclaimer: Wolfram Employee

Based on great comments and questions, we updated the "frequently anticipated
questions" to "frequently asked questions" (at midnight last night, on
Stephen's laptop).

We have a feeling this will continuously be updated - please let us know if
you have any questions, if something isn't quite clear, or just what you're
going to do with it.

[https://www.wolfram.com/engine/faq/](https://www.wolfram.com/engine/faq/)

Cheers!

------
75dvtwin
I am sure they have thought about, but decided against it.

However, I think, what they should have done is have an open-sourced language
runtime, and closed source some subset of the libraries.

In other words, keep eco-system open-sourced (and also protected from patent
abuse), while maintaining some libraries closed source.

Perhaps, Wolfram believes that the competitive/money making advantage is in
the engine, not in the libraries.

But if that's the case, then the open source competition is closer to beating
it, than we think.

------
misterman0
Just a quick reminder; my MIT licensed open source project Resin [0] does
pretty much of what WA does. It's free today and it will be free tomorrow.
Free to use in production, to clone, fork, tear apart. Like WA

\- it's a linguistic engine

\- it has a query language

\- there is a cloud you can use [1] if you don't want to host it on-premise

\- it has high level API's for creating language models from JSON documents
(or in other ways formatted)

\- low level API's for creating whatever 64-bit vector space you might want

\- tools that help you in the analysis phase

\- tools for creating and deploy HTTP endpoints for reading from/writing to
your model

Next week I'm freezing the API's for I will have reached v0.4, because by
then, at my day job, we will have completed our first "AI powered" closed-
sourced product based on Resin.

For this project to have any bearing and to stay alive and well (and free
forever) I need your help. I need a community of contributors. Chip in, it's
for a good cause!

Edit, and here are the links:

[0] [https://github.com/kreeben/resin](https://github.com/kreeben/resin)

[1] [https://didyougogo.com](https://didyougogo.com) (currently down, b/c
maintenance)

~~~
deckar01
> does pretty much of what WA does... it's a linguistic engine

Wolfram Alpha is a symbolic computation engine. I'm sure it does some natural
language parsing for queries on the website, but I doubt that is an important
feature for most developers considering this engine for production
applications.

~~~
misterman0
>> Wolfram Alpha is a symbolic computation engine.

That's a great piece of technology to have when you are trying to get machines
to understand humans.

The reason Resin is not a symbolic computation engine is because that model
hasn't been designed yet. Luckily Resin is a vector space framework that you
can use to nest spaces together or transform into new spaces. Building on
Resins capabilities for creating models from any 64-bit embedding I'm not
quite sure if there is anything Resin cannot model.

~~~
reikonomusha
Yeah, but, come on. Isn’t this oversimplifying? “My computer uses bits. That
means anything you can make out of bits can run on my computer.” It’s true but
essentially vacuous. The value is/includes these difficult-to-build
technologies, so the mere fact they _could_ be included isn’t so meaningful
and doesn’t add much value.

~~~
misterman0
Sure, but I was not trying to bluff you. Instead I was trying to describe to
you a crucial point that is missing from the project's documentation (where I
mostly describe the NLP engine) and that is that Resin at its core is a tool
for designing such complex models as symbolic computation.

But I hear you. Resin is not Wolfram but more of a framework that you can use
to produce something like Wolfram.

------
HankB99
The program is available (and installed by default) on the full Raspbian
operating system for the Raspberry Pi. (Raspbian is the Debian Linux variant
tailored for the Raspberry Pi.) I've never tried it. There is a Raspbian
variant for Intel based systems but I do not know if it includes Wolfram
Alpha.

------
tonetheman
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.

~~~
jonhendry18
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/](https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-12/)

------
ElijahLynn
"The Free Wolfram Engine for Developers is available for pre-production
software development."

[https://www.wolfram.com/engine/](https://www.wolfram.com/engine/)

------
fori1to10
I have Mathematica installed. Can I have WolframEngine side by side?

~~~
arnoud-buzing
Yes, but it will not give you anything new: The Wolfram Engine provides full
access to the Wolfram Language (just like Mathematica) via command line access
and executing Wolfram Language scripts.

------
navigaid
try this:

    
    
      docker run -it wolframengine/wolframengine

~~~
1f60c
Is this official?

~~~
navigaid
It is not official and has been removed.

------
r-w
It remains to be seen whether most software developers value the services that
Wolfram provides enough to swallow the proprietary pill.

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

~~~
halirutan
No prototype, but you might want to look at

[https://rulebasedintegration.org/](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

~~~
ChrisRackauckas
Is there a wrapper for this into Julia? I would like to make use of it!

------
iamcreasy
So it only provides a command line interface, but not the notebook interface.
Am I getting it right?

~~~
arnoud-buzing
There is a Jupyter notebook interface for the Wolfram Language:

[https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter](https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter)

Additionally, many IDEs support Wolfram Language for syntax coloring, command
completion, contextual help, etc.:

[http://www.wolfram.com/developer/](http://www.wolfram.com/developer/)

~~~
abc_lisper
I tried this, and it works great. Awesome, Thanks Wolfram!

[https://imgur.com/VoHXMtS](https://imgur.com/VoHXMtS)

~~~
mlevental
this is with this new Dev version or the conventional version?

~~~
abc_lisper
The free dev version

------
LeicaLatte
Loved the onboarding.

------
cahotswh
Interesting that some comments which are insightful and anti wolf clan are
deleted . Seems like Hackernews and wolf clan are in cahots

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Quite the opposite: I've never seen a HN discussion about Wolfram where the
company, the person, the language and the pricing model don't all end up
getting torn to shreds.

------
781
It doesn't seem to have a notebook interface.

Maybe someone can hook this into Jupyter as a Wolfram kernel?

~~~
T-A
[https://www.wolfram.com/notebooks/](https://www.wolfram.com/notebooks/)

~~~
781
That doesn't seem to be included into this free engine, only command line
access

------
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?

------
idlewords
This looks intriguing, but how many wolframs does it get to the wolfram?

~~~
rjknight
How many wolves would a Wolfram ram if a Wolfram could ram wolves?

------
enriquto
I don't understand why don't they AGPL the thing already. It makes no sense.

