Wolfram Engine Is Now Free for Developers

Wolfram Research announced today that it will make the Wolfram Engine available for free to anyone working on software development projects. You can download it for use in non-production environments here.

The Free Wolfram Engine for Developers will allow developers to implement the Wolfram Language in any standard software engineering stack. (The Wolfram Language, available in a sandbox here, is the multi-paradigm computational language behind Wolfram's best-known products, Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.) The free engine also has full access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase and its curated, pre-trained neural networks, although you'll need to sign up for a free subscription to the Wolfram Cloud. 

"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," computer scientist and founder Stephen Wolfram said in a blog post announcing the new project. He explained that the Wolfram Language, especially when packaged in Mathematica, has seen wide adoption for research purposes, data science, and education. The goal for the free engine is to increase usage of the Wolfram Language among developers building software products and applications (and, of course, to encourage paid subscriptions to Wolfram desktop and cloud options).

According to VentureBeat, Wolfram Alpha just celebrated its 10-year anniversary last week. The Wolfram Engine also drives Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that answers specific queries after referring to the Wolfram Knowledgebase. It powers some searches for DuckDuckGo and Microsoft Bing search engines, as well as computational questions for Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri.

"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," Wolfram said. "The goal of the Wolfram Language is simple, if ambitious: have everything be right there, in the language, and be as automatic as possible."

The license for the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers can be found here.