13 ms·

Wolfram Programming Cloud Is Live

186 points by szhorvat 12y ago

szhorvat 12y 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/ http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/
- taliesinb 12y ago
  The new "fast introduction for programmers" is also a good place to start: http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-programmers/interactive-usage/ http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-progra...
  - szhorvat 12y ago
    Yes, exactly. I should have said, try Mathematica.SE for questions after having read through the inroductory tutorials. :-) Thanks for the link!
  - taliesinb 12y 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-1ea8-4df6-9f99-8995ef312428 https://programming.wolframcloud.com/objects/7ea9a27a-1ea8-4...
szhorvat 12y ago
Try it out here: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/ https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/
natch 12y ago
"Try it for free"... nope. Languages should be free, period, not free for trial.
- swalsh 12y ago
  "Languages should be free, period, not free for trial." Why?
  - natch 12y ago
    See my answer to tedsanders.
- tedsanders 12y 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.
  - natch 12y 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - carlob 12y ago
      > 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. What about the computer itself. I don't want to argue one way or the other but the hierarchy: Hardware (non-free) OS (sometimes-free) Programming language (mostly-free) Programs (sometimes-free) seems pretty arbitrary.
spitfire 12y ago
Is anyone else having trouble getting this site to load? When I login I get either a blank screen or an error page.
- tedsanders 12y ago
  Nope, it's working for me.
- dalecooper 12y 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!
szhorvat 12y 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 12y 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.
  - szhorvat 12y ago
    Thanks, that explaines it!
jimmcslim 12y 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 12y 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.
- taliesinb 12y 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 12y ago
<cough> http://cloud.sagemath.org http://cloud.sagemath.org </cough>
- gone35 12y 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 http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
  - Chinasol 12y 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...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - gone35 12y ago
      Agree completely. For onboarding tentative users just interested in trying out a product, front-ends should be using email-only or even URL-only authentication instead.
- _delirium 12y 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.
scrumper 12y ago
Does anyone (taliesinb?) know if there is any additional benefit to the Desktop version over Mathematica?
- taliesinb 12y 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.
  - szhorvat 12y 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?
    - taliesinb 12y ago
      AFAIK, Mathematica 10 won't have cloud integration. And the semantic stuff will be present, but will be "trial grade". The emphasis in Discovery and Data Science platforms will be around workflow and reporting, though the features there haven't been finalized yet.
      - taliesinb 12y ago
        I've been told I'm wrong, Mathematica 10 will have cloud integration, but with a product called Mathematica Online (see wolframcloud.com for the whole family of cloud products).
  - scrumper 12y 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 12y ago
Interesting how 'meh' the comments are. I thought that building live APIs on the web looked pretty amazing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - taliesinb 12y ago
    You use that quote misleadingly. Stephen (not Steven) wrote: "My goal with the Wolfram Language in general—and Wolfram Programming Cloud in particular—is to redefine the process of programming" That's a goal, not a claim about the product. And one that many people in the industry share, and routinely espouse.
    - comex 12y ago
      I think that's a very generous interpretation - assuming that you mean the goal is long-term, else it basically is a claim anyway. Elsewhere he talks about "building up technology stack that is needed" in two previous products, which is now "in definitive form" - suggesting that the "goal" is in terms of a succession of products of which this is (close to) the pinnacle, rather than a long-term goal for the current product. He also outright states that this language is [now] "a new type of programming language" which "makes feasible for the first time all sorts of programming that were basically absurd to consider before" (emphasis mine), which is along the same lines as "redefining programming". As a Wolfram Research employee I suppose you are in a privileged position regarding what Wolfram meant, but that's what I'm reading from what he said. Oh, and I'm not outright stating the language does not redefine the process of programming - depending on your definition of "redefine", and whether the language lives up to the hype (I have barely tried Mathematica and certainly it looks very powerful in some areas). Nor is wanting to do so unique to Wolfram - things like Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" attempt to take up the same kind of mantle. I am merely criticizing the idea that Wolfram didn't say it does.
    - gone35 12y ago
      It's not misleading at all --hinging on a literal reading of that quote is just disingenuous. For the record, further down that blog post[1], Wolfram writes (emphasis added): "So what does it all mean? I think it's pretty important, because it really changes the whole process --and economics-- of programming. I've even seen it quite dramatically within our own company. As the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Programming Cloud have been coming together, there've been more and more places where we've been able to use them internally. And each time, it's been amazing to see programming tasks that used to take weeks or months suddenly get done in days or less." How is that not a very concrete claim about the product? [1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-cloud-is-live/ http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-...
ljlolel 12y ago
Kind of sounds like http://www.terminal.com http://www.terminal.com but Mathematica-specific
rogerallen 12y ago
Can anyone point to where pricing is described? I couldn't find any info.
- szhorvat 12y ago
  It's here: https://billing.wolframcloud.com/pricing.html?p=wpc https://billing.wolframcloud.com/pricing.html?p=wpc
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jjoergensen 12y 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/ http://www.wolfram.com/programming-cloud/pricing/
- carlob 12y 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.
  - jjoergensen 12y ago
    Thank you for making this clear! :-)
- IanCal 12y 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.
  - taliesinb 12y 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/ http://www.wolfram.com/cloud-credits/ has more info.
tempodox 12y ago
If you like paying through the nose for hyperbole, this is for you.
cantankerous 12y 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.
- taliesinb 12y 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 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.
  - NotAtWork 12y 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.
beauzero 12y ago
meh

186 points by szhorvat 12y 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/ http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/

taliesinb 12y ago
The new "fast introduction for programmers" is also a good place to start: http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-programmers/interactive-usage/ http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-progra...
- szhorvat 12y ago
  Yes, exactly. I should have said, try Mathematica.SE for questions after having read through the inroductory tutorials. :-) Thanks for the link!
- taliesinb 12y 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-1ea8-4df6-9f99-8995ef312428 https://programming.wolframcloud.com/objects/7ea9a27a-1ea8-4...

szhorvat 12y ago

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

natch 12y ago

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

swalsh 12y ago
"Languages should be free, period, not free for trial." Why?
- natch 12y ago
  See my answer to tedsanders.
tedsanders 12y 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.
- natch 12y 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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - carlob 12y ago
    > 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. What about the computer itself. I don't want to argue one way or the other but the hierarchy: Hardware (non-free) OS (sometimes-free) Programming language (mostly-free) Programs (sometimes-free) seems pretty arbitrary.

spitfire 12y ago

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

tedsanders 12y ago
Nope, it's working for me.
dalecooper 12y 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!

szhorvat 12y 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 12y 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.
- szhorvat 12y ago
  Thanks, that explaines it!

jimmcslim 12y 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 12y 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.
taliesinb 12y 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 12y ago

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

gone35 12y 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 http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
- Chinasol 12y 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...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - gone35 12y ago
    Agree completely. For onboarding tentative users just interested in trying out a product, front-ends should be using email-only or even URL-only authentication instead.
_delirium 12y 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.

scrumper 12y ago

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

taliesinb 12y 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.
- szhorvat 12y 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?
  - taliesinb 12y ago
    AFAIK, Mathematica 10 won't have cloud integration. And the semantic stuff will be present, but will be "trial grade". The emphasis in Discovery and Data Science platforms will be around workflow and reporting, though the features there haven't been finalized yet.
    - taliesinb 12y ago
      I've been told I'm wrong, Mathematica 10 will have cloud integration, but with a product called Mathematica Online (see wolframcloud.com for the whole family of cloud products).
- scrumper 12y 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 12y ago

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

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- taliesinb 12y ago
  You use that quote misleadingly. Stephen (not Steven) wrote: "My goal with the Wolfram Language in general—and Wolfram Programming Cloud in particular—is to redefine the process of programming" That's a goal, not a claim about the product. And one that many people in the industry share, and routinely espouse.
  - comex 12y ago
    I think that's a very generous interpretation - assuming that you mean the goal is long-term, else it basically is a claim anyway. Elsewhere he talks about "building up technology stack that is needed" in two previous products, which is now "in definitive form" - suggesting that the "goal" is in terms of a succession of products of which this is (close to) the pinnacle, rather than a long-term goal for the current product. He also outright states that this language is [now] "a new type of programming language" which "makes feasible for the first time all sorts of programming that were basically absurd to consider before" (emphasis mine), which is along the same lines as "redefining programming". As a Wolfram Research employee I suppose you are in a privileged position regarding what Wolfram meant, but that's what I'm reading from what he said. Oh, and I'm not outright stating the language does not redefine the process of programming - depending on your definition of "redefine", and whether the language lives up to the hype (I have barely tried Mathematica and certainly it looks very powerful in some areas). Nor is wanting to do so unique to Wolfram - things like Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" attempt to take up the same kind of mantle. I am merely criticizing the idea that Wolfram didn't say it does.
  - gone35 12y ago
    It's not misleading at all --hinging on a literal reading of that quote is just disingenuous. For the record, further down that blog post[1], Wolfram writes (emphasis added): "So what does it all mean? I think it's pretty important, because it really changes the whole process --and economics-- of programming. I've even seen it quite dramatically within our own company. As the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Programming Cloud have been coming together, there've been more and more places where we've been able to use them internally. And each time, it's been amazing to see programming tasks that used to take weeks or months suddenly get done in days or less." How is that not a very concrete claim about the product? [1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-cloud-is-live/ http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-...

ljlolel 12y ago

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

rogerallen 12y ago

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

szhorvat 12y ago
It's here: https://billing.wolframcloud.com/pricing.html?p=wpc https://billing.wolframcloud.com/pricing.html?p=wpc

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jjoergensen 12y 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/ http://www.wolfram.com/programming-cloud/pricing/

carlob 12y 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.
- jjoergensen 12y ago
  Thank you for making this clear! :-)
IanCal 12y 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.
- taliesinb 12y 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/ http://www.wolfram.com/cloud-credits/ has more info.

tempodox 12y ago

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

cantankerous 12y 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.

taliesinb 12y 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 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.
- NotAtWork 12y 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.

beauzero 12y ago

meh