Wolfram Programming Cloud Is Live

http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-cloud-is-live/

by szhorvat • 12 years ago

186 103 12 years ago

blog.wolfram.com

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

For people new to the Wolfram Language: it's essentially a new version of the programming language of Mathematica. if you're looking for help on StackExchange, go to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

The new "fast introduction for programmers" is also a good place to start:

http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-progra...

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

Yes, exactly. I should have said, try Mathematica.SE for questions after having read through the inroductory tutorials. :-) Thanks for the link!

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

I should also add that the "Things to try" notebook has some simple examples that demo various kinds of functionality: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/objects/7ea9a27a-1ea8-4...

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

Try it out here: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/

natch5• 12 years ago

"Try it for free"... nope. Languages should be free, period, not free for trial.

swalsh• 12 years ago

"Languages should be free, period, not free for trial." Why?

natch5• 12 years ago

See my answer to tedsanders.

tedsanders2• 12 years ago

Could you explain why you believe this and why it applies to languages but not other tools? I don't have a strong opinion either way, but to me it seems fair that people should be compensated for the innovative work they do.

natch5• 12 years ago

I've done, and many of us do, tons of very valuable innovative work that we're not financially compensated for. There are other kinds of compensation, of course, and sometimes indirect financial benefits.

I just don't think the language will thrive as well as it could if the number of users is limited by a financial barrier. Sure, it will have users, and sure, they will find it useful, but a lot of its potential will go unrealized.

You could make the same argument with tools, so why are languages different? I think because they are more foundational.. other tools are built IN them not just using them. They become a substrate. Or not, if they're not widely used.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Ignoring all of the politics of "Free Software" and/or "Open Source Software", as a practical matter languages that are not available in no-cost implementations are rarely successful outside of very niche markets.

Though, arguably, the type of stuff Mathematica is used for is already sufficiently niche that this is less of a concern.

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

The Rasperberry PI contains a "free, period" release of the language: http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

But no, the language is not open source, and that is unlikely to change in the future.

superfx• 12 years ago

Except that they're not just providing a language, but a back-end for cloud computing.

natch5• 12 years ago

I would be happy to do the computing on my own servers.

vph• 12 years ago

Not to defend Wolfram, but to understand this you'll have to understand that "The Wolfram Language" is not like the traditional "programming languages". Traditional programming languages consist of a set of grammar, essential built-in libraries and a few development tools. The Wolfram Language is more than that. It includes the Mathematica language, a very rich set of libraries/algorithms, rich bodies of knowledge encoded in curated datasets in various kinds of physical and social sciences.

It might be best to compare the Wolfram Language to natural languages like English instead of programming language. The English language is not just a set of grammar, but also a rich collection of vocabularies that need to be compiled and maintained, and perhaps a rich collection of literature that need to be maintained and expanded to help learners understand the language.

Wolfram spent quite some time and resources to collect data for his Wolfram Alpha, and his new "language". It makes sense to charge money for such efforts.

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

They also spend time and money keeping that dataset up-to-date.

comex• 12 years ago

It's not like every other popular language doesn't include huge rich sets of free libraries and algorithms - Mathematica has few good competitors (not none) in many math and science areas, but competitors are obviously much richer in most of the rest (which is important for a general purpose programming language). It's just that those libraries are usually spread among many open source libraries written by different people rather than being all centralized.

Based on an accounting of the work involved, it's reasonable to charge, but based on the options available (and the relative unprovenness of the Wolfram Language), it's also perfectly reasonable for people like the parent to insist on free languages only. It's what Wolfram's competing with, at least in the view of the world where it's not singlehandedly "redefin[ing] the process of programming"...

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Not to defend Wolfram, but to understand this you'll have to understand that "The Wolfram Language" is not like the traditional "programming languages".

Of course not, its a New Kind of Programming Language.

fillybuster• 12 years ago

It looks like it is not a free trial but free with use limits.

IE You can use it for free forever, but just not too much each month. Pay for more CPU time after you hit your limit or wait until next month to get more free time.

_delirium2• 12 years ago

It looks like there's also a 30-day limit on "deployments" in the free tier. It's not 100% clear to me what that means, but I'd guess it means public-facing apps built on top of the API need a paid account to deploy more than as temporary/test setups.

spitfire• 12 years ago

Is anyone else having trouble getting this site to load? When I login I get either a blank screen or an error page.

tedsanders2• 12 years ago

Nope, it's working for me.

dalecooper• 12 years ago

I've been experiencing the same problem all day. The server keeps sending 500 errors and complaining about being down. I've been excited about this launch all year, and naturally trying to access the app all day. No dice!

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

Can anyone enlighten me about why the title of the post got changed? I tried to squeeze all the relevant information in there, to make it easy for people to decide whether they're interesed or not. I really hope it's not because some of the commenters don't like this system not being open source, and find the "try it for free" bit not politically correct.

underwater• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what is was before, but as per HN guidelines:

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

Thanks, that explaines it!

jimmcslim• 12 years ago

It's a bit disappointing that I have to sign up for an account, there doesn't appear to be a free-tier that is completely signup free (e.g. like tryruby.org, or a plethora of similar sites). I'm not denying them the opportunity to make money, but there is a user friction issue here to even take a peek.

I wonder if folks would be less cynical about this if they gave it a name other than 'the Wolfram Language' (how about 'Sym'?)

pohl• 12 years ago

I wonder if folks would be less cynical about this if they gave it a name other than 'the Wolfram Language'

That's a non-starter. Have you ever seen a copy of A New Kind of Science? Stephen figured out how to get his full name printed on every single page. That was no accident.

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

There will be "playgrounds" that demonstrate different features and domains for you to live-code in your browser, and those will be AFAIK signup free, but that feature isn't quite ready yet.

sdenton4• 12 years ago

<cough> http://cloud.sagemath.org </cough>

gone352• 12 years ago

Thank you for posting this. It wasn't immediately clear for me what Sage was though, so I'm pasting the project's description from their home page [1] here in case others were confused as well:

Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more.

Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.

Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.

[1] http://www.sagemath.org/index.html

Chinasol• 12 years ago

This looks more interesting than the (pricey) Wolfram offering, but they certainly have a weird password fetish if you try to open an account. Never found anything so fierce before, and I just wanted to take a look...

_delirium2• 12 years ago

In a way the progress of Sage actually does remind me that Mathematica and the new Wolfram stuff are pretty impressive. I think eventually Sage will overtake it, and I personally feel much more comfortable doing science on top of an open-source stack. But Mathematica was pretty ahead of its time with some of the ideas that are now being implemented on the open-source side of things, like the live "notebook" interface (which Mathematica has had since the '80s). I think it had/has a lot of the right ideas about how to build an interactive workbench that ties together a bunch of built in functionality, with both graphical and REPL/language interfaces to it. And I think the Wolfram Language stuff is making the right moves in generalizing that to data-mining/ML, cloud integration, domain-specific things like built-in mapping support, etc. It's less of a revolution than Wolfram wants you to believe, but it's still good, quite well designed.

There are bits of that concept that come from elsewhere, so it's not 100% novel coming from nowhere. E.g. older computer-algebra systems, Matlab, etc., all have bits of the ideas that this particular class of mathematics+data systems is converging on. But prior to the current wave of open-source stuff, I think Mathematica had the best example of integrating it all into a usable system. It might still be the most polished and integrated one out there; parts of Sage still very much feel like libraries with different conceptual/interaction models, glued together with a thin layer of Python glue. Though Sage does have the advantage of being able to add functionality at a more rapid pace, and I assume the integration will get more seamless in the future.

scrumper3• 12 years ago

Does anyone (taliesinb?) know if there is any additional benefit to the Desktop version over Mathematica?

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

Wolfram Desktop has built-in integration with the cloud -- it can save and load straight from your cloud files.

It also sheds a lot of the historical computer algebra baggage of Mathematica -- palettes for entering equations and so on are gone.

And although it doesn't support this yet, Wolfram Desktop will soon let you connect straight to a cloud kernel. It'll be really cool: you'll write ParallelMap, and (say) 32 kernels in the cloud will be summoned for you.

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

What will it be able to do that Mathematica won't have? (Will Mathematica also have cloud integration?)

And what about the Discovery Platform and Data Science platform? How will these differ from Mathematica?

scrumper3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the reply; the last feature is pretty cool. I'll certainly have a play with the free 'dabbler' edition (I forgot what it was called), but it doesn't sound like there's much to tempt me away from Mathematica for the time being. I use the CAS stuff a fair bit now.

bprater• 12 years ago

Interesting how 'meh' the comments are. I thought that building live APIs on the web looked pretty amazing.

soup10• 12 years ago

The blog post was a lot of 'this is amazing and will change everything'(which wolfram thinks about everything he does, lol) without a convincing demonstration as to why. To me it sounds like they added more features to the Mathematica language. Which while potentially cool, it isn't likely to become a mainstream development language anytime soon. Seems most useful for quick data visualizations.

59nadir• 12 years ago

The thing is that it's impossible to read an interview, article or anything by Wolfram and not be washed over with hyperbolic statements about what his products mean and do.

Last time I saw The Wolfram Language, for example, on HN it was full of statements like how there finally was a language that made functional programming possible, etc., and when you look at the feature set there's absolutely nothing new that makes any kind of difference.

While this platform certainly seems interesting and it actually does seem to do something new, listening to Stephen Wolfram talk about how great his stuff is has gotten tiresome in general.

arkj• 12 years ago

I think one should judge the quality of the product not the author and his ego. But I agree, sometimes it can be tough. :)

mathattack• 12 years ago

It's a shame because he really is THAT smart. It's almost like the hype deters from the message.

mcdonji• 12 years ago

I thought so too but when I actually tried using "the language" it was more like using an application (excel?). For example there are no sockets. You can't create a hello world protocol. I was disappointed.

Tarang• 12 years ago

I think its because Stephen Wolfram built it. If anyone else did it it would be super awesome. While I don't share the hate I see this every time with anything 'Wolfram' on HN.

ljlolel• 12 years ago

Kind of sounds like http://www.terminal.com but Mathematica-specific

rogerallen• 12 years ago

Can anyone point to where pricing is described? I couldn't find any info.

szhorvat11• 12 years ago

It's here: https://billing.wolframcloud.com/pricing.html?p=wpc

jjoergensen2• 12 years ago

Am I missing something here?. The number of API calls per month seems to be extremely low?

With 100 or 1000 API calls, how can you make a "dynamic" application? This would only be useful for static / stale content.

What good is purchasing more credits, if I only have a very low number of API calls?

http://www.wolfram.com/programming-cloud/pricing/

carlob2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can purchase more API calls.

However I want to make clear that those API calls are to Wolfram's servers for things like natural language parsing and data. You can write an APIFunction that does not use API calls, but just uses cloud credits to do computation.

I understand it can be confusing, but there is a difference between API calls to your CloudObjects and API calls from your CloudObjects.

jjoergensen2• 12 years ago

Thank you for making this clear! :-)

IanCal• 12 years ago

Ouch, cloud credits at $180/M. That's 0.18c for 1000, or 100s of compute time. $6.50/hr for computation, and that's buying in bulk, it's almost $11/hr if you buy in blocks of $15.

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

Note that's API and knowledgebase computation time, not notebook computation time, which doesn't cost cloud credits.

Cloud credits come with each plan, as well, so you have some leeway for development and testing before you have to buy additional cloud credits at a base price 0.03 cents per credit.

http://www.wolfram.com/cloud-credits/ has more info.

tempodox• 12 years ago

If you like paying through the nose for hyperbole, this is for you.

cantankerous• 12 years ago

I find the conflation of language with runtime in the flag example to be especially obnoxious. All the Wolfram Language looks like to me in this example is a bunch of key value pairs with some hidden calls to a runtime that costs me money to use.

Not that I'm against spending money for something that's useful, nor am I against Stephen Wolfram trying to make a buck. It just seems a little misleading to bid this product as a "language" when really it seems like it's just a giant library/extended runtime for Mathematica.

taliesinb14• 12 years ago

Let me correct you: Mathematica is a desktop product, specifically an IDE for the Wolfram Language. It is not a language, though before we had the name "Wolfram Language" it was used to mean that. Other such IDEs are Wolfram Desktop, the Eclipse-based Workbench, and the cloud-based Programming Cloud that is being announced here.

And although I'm biased, I don't think it is unfair for our language to meter access to an expensive resource in the form of real world data. There are complex translation layers that mediate access to a diversity of different databases, real time and static, and merge them to present a nice, clean logical view.

On top of that, cleaning and curating the data is expensive, and it has to be done in perpetuity -- think how often PersonData (http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/PersonData.html) needs to be updated, for example. Some data we also have to buy outright.

Should this prevent us building such real-world data into the language? I suspect in 20 years this idea will be common in new languages, and probably free.

For now, it needs to be subsidized, and the basis is fair: we charge Cloud Credits on the basis of the amount of time our servers are kept busy: 0.3 cents per second of computation time on our API servers. As we make our APIs faster, that effective cost will only go down.

NotAtWork3• 12 years ago

Should this prevent us building such real-world data into the language?

You didn't build it in to the language, you connected the language to a standard database via the hosted, proprietary runtime.

I'm not against this in principle - it's clearly a useful thing - but it's hardly revolutionary.

I already pay a company for essentially the same thing (where I use a DSL embedded in a programming language to interact with their database of social media).

Again, I'm not against the idea as I understand it, but the misuse of terminology and generally the way that various people associated with the project talk about it is a huge turn off.

akater5• 12 years ago

Mathematica is a desktop product, specifically an IDE for the Wolfram Language

Presenting Mathematica (or, rather, FrontEnd?) as IDE is harmful for its reputation among hackers:

1) Workflow differs from one in traditional IDEs, and lots of build tools are simply not there

2) It has different goals, being a bottom-up environment: users start with tiny one-cell programs; IDEs like Eclipse suggest to “create a new project” by default

It's a tool for discovery and improvisation, not for building large programs, with multi-modular source code provided by different independent authors, that is sometimes (often?) written in different languages.

“Improvisations and Experiment Environment” or something like that would be a more adequate description.

It's not that FrontEnd can't be an IDE too. I believe it can be a better IDE than anything else out there but experienced programmers disagree unanimously. Part of it is personal tastes, part is mind being closed by means of classical IDE heritage, part is not-so-rational disgust towards proprietary software, paid software, S.W., etc.

FrontEnd and the language itself encourage users to add features themselves. Those who persist probably end up with the highly personalised product the majority of them could never buy. (+) Still, some features would be universally needed, so one might want to install a package from a public hub, but FrontEnd lacks this feature. (–)

I think hackers would appreciate it more if Mathematica (FrontEnd?) were marketed as emacs-like tool. Still, without a proper package manager (and an open package server, or at least an open standard for package server) it would be a hopeless take. — Though I heard something like package manager is coming. :-)

beauzero• 12 years ago

meh

Wolfram Programming Cloud Is Live

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