Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?

It happens far too often. I’ll be talking to a software developer, and they’ll be saying how great they think our technology is, and how it helped them so much in school, or in doing R&D. But then I’ll ask them, “So, are you using Wolfram Language and its computational intelligence in your production software system?” Sometimes the answer is yes. But too often, there’s an awkward silence, and then they’ll say, “Well, no. Could I?”

I want to make sure the answer to this can always be: “Yes, it’s easy!” And to help achieve that, we’re releasing today the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers. It’s a full engine for the Wolfram Language, that can be deployed on any system—and called from programs, languages, web servers, or anything.

The Wolfram Engine is the heart of all our products. It’s what implements the Wolfram Language, with all its computational intelligence, algorithms, knowledgebase, and so on. It’s what powers our desktop products (including Mathematica), as well as our cloud platform. It’s what’s inside Wolfram|Alpha—as well as an increasing number of major production systems out in the world. And as of today, we’re making it available for anyone to download, for free, to use in their software development projects.

The Wolfram Language

Many people know the Wolfram Language (often in the form of Mathematica) as a powerful system for interactive computing—and for doing R&D, education, data science and “computational X” for many X. But increasingly it’s also being used “behind the scenes” as a key component in building production software systems. And what the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers now does is to package it so it’s convenient to insert into a whole range of software engineering environments and projects.

It’s worth explaining a bit about how I see the Wolfram Language these days. (By the way, you can run it immediately on the web in the Wolfram Language Sandbox.) The most important thing is to realize that the Wolfram Language as it now exists is really a new kind of thing: a full-scale computational language. Yes, it’s an extremely powerful and productive (symbolic, functional, …) programming language. But it’s much more than that. Because it’s got the unique feature of having a huge amount of computational knowledge built right into it: knowledge about algorithms, knowledge about the real world, knowledge about how to automate things.

We’ve been steadily building up what’s now the Wolfram Language for more than 30 years—and one thing I’m particularly proud of (though it’s hard work; e.g. check out the livestreams!) is how uniform, elegant and stable a design we’ve been able to maintain across the whole language. There are now altogether 5000+ functions in the language, covering everything from visualization to machine learning, numerics, image computation, geometry, higher math and natural language understanding—as well as lots of areas of real-world knowledge (geo, medical, cultural, engineering, scientific, etc.).

In recent years, we’ve also introduced lots of hardcore software engineering capabilities—instant cloud deployment, network programming, web interaction, database connectivity, import/export (200+ formats), process control, unit testing, report generation, cryptography, blockchain, etc. (The symbolic nature of the language makes these particularly clean and powerful.)

The goal of the Wolfram Language is simple, if ambitious: have everything be right there, in the language, and be as automatic as possible. Need to analyze an image? Need geographic data? Audio processing? Solve an optimization problem? Weather information? Generate 3D geometry? Anatomical data? NLP entity identification? Find anomalies in a time series? Send a mail message? Get a digital signature? All these things (and many, many more) are just functions that you can immediately call in any program you write in Wolfram Language. (There are no libraries to hunt down; everything is just integrated into the language.)

Back on the earliest computers, all one had was machine code. But then came simple programming languages. And soon one could also take it for granted that one’s computer would have an operating system. Later also networking, then a user interface, then web connectivity. My goal with the Wolfram Language is to provide a layer of computational intelligence that in effect encapsulates the computational knowledge of our civilization, and lets people take it for granted that their computer will know how to identify objects in an image, or how to solve equations, or what the populations of cities are, or countless other things.

And now, today, what we want to do with the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers is to make this something ubiquitous, and immediately available to any software developer.

The Wolfram Engine

The Free Wolfram Engine for Developers implements the full Wolfram Language as a software component that can immediately be plugged into any standard software engineering stack. It runs on any standard platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, RasPi, …; desktop, server, virtualized, distributed, parallelized, embedded). You can use it directly with a script, or from a command line. You can call it from programming languages (Python, Java, .NET, C/C++, …), or from other systems (Excel, Jupyter, Unity, Rhino, …). You can call it through sockets, ZeroMQ, MQTT or its own native WSTP (Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol). It reads and writes hundreds of formats (CSV, JSON, XML, …), and connects to databases (SQL, RDF/SPARQL, Mongo, …), and can call external programs (executables, libraries, …), browsers, mail servers, APIs, devices, and languages (Python, NodeJS, Java, .NET, R, …). Soon it’ll also plug directly into web servers (J2EE, aiohttp, Django, …). And you can edit and manage your Wolfram Language code with standard IDEs, editors and tools (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Atom, Vim, Visual Studio Code, Git, …).

The Free Wolfram Engine for Developers has access to the whole Wolfram Knowledgebase, through a free Basic subscription to the Wolfram Cloud. (Unless you want real-time data, everything can be cached, so you can run the Wolfram Engine without network connectivity.) The Basic subscription to the Wolfram Cloud also lets you deploy limited APIs in the cloud.

A key feature of the Wolfram Language is that you can run the exact same code anywhere. You can run it interactively using Wolfram Notebooks—on the desktop, in the cloud, and on mobile. You can run it in a cloud API (or scheduled task, etc.), on the public Wolfram Cloud, or in a Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud. And now, with the Wolfram Engine, you can also easily run it deep inside any standard software engineering stack.

(Of course, if you want to use our whole hyperarchitecture spanning desktop, server, cloud, parallel, embedded, mobile—and interactive, development and production computing—then a good entry point is Wolfram|One, and, yes, there are trial versions available.)

Going into Production

OK, so how does the licensing for Free Wolfram Engine for Developers work? For the past 30+ years, our company has had a very straightforward model: we license our software to generate revenue that allows us to continue our long-term mission of continuous, energetic R&D. We’ve also made many important things available for free—like our main Wolfram|Alpha website, Wolfram Player and basic access to the Wolfram Cloud.

The Free Wolfram Engine for Developers is intended for use in pre-production software development. You can use it to develop a product for yourself or your company. You can use it to conduct personal projects at home, at school or at work. And you can use it to explore the Wolfram Language for future production projects. (Here’s the actual license, if you’re curious.)

When you have a system ready to go into production, then you get a Production License for the Wolfram Engine. Exactly how that works will depend on what kind of system you’ve built. There are options for local individual or enterprise deployment, for distributing the Wolfram Engine with software or hardware, for deploying in cloud computing platforms—and for deploying in the Wolfram Cloud or Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud.

If you’re making a free, open-source system, you can apply for a Free Production License. Also, if you’re part of a Wolfram Site License (of the type that, for example, most universities have), then you can freely use Free Wolfram Engine for Developers for anything that license permits.

We haven’t worked out all the corners and details of every possible use of the Wolfram Engine. But we are committed to providing predictable and straightforward licensing for the long term (and we’re working to ensure the availability and vitality of the Wolfram Language in perpetuity, independent of our company). We’ve now had consistent pricing for our products for 30+ years, and we want to stay as far away as possible from the many variants of bait-and-switch which have become all too prevalent in modern software licensing.

So Use It!

I’m very proud of what we’ve created with Wolfram Language, and it’s been wonderful to see all the inventions, discoveries and education that have happened with it over decades. But in recent years there’s been a new frontier: the increasingly widespread use of the Wolfram Language inside large-scale software projects. Sometimes the whole project is built in Wolfram Language. Sometimes Wolfram Language is inserted to add some critical computational intelligence, perhaps even just in a corner of the project.

The goal of the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers is to make it easy for anyone to use the Wolfram Language in any software development project—and to build systems that take advantage of its computational intelligence.

We’ve worked hard to make the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers as easy to use and deploy as possible. But if there’s something that doesn’t work for you or your project, please send me mail! Otherwise, please use what we’ve built—and do something great with it!