(Browse some questions on )Ĭons: Mostly around familiarity and ubiquity, versus a closed ecosystem. Pros: The Wolfram / Mathematica language, once you learn it, is likely to be consistent and powerful. I took a small notebook I had made in Colab:Īnd tried converting it to Wolfram Cloud: I briefly tried using it a couple of weeks ago, when there was a post here ( ) about it. They have built an incredibly smart solution, but it sorts of have a curse by design preventing it from moving out of the interactive niche. My point is that this will never happen because of the aforementioned paradox. This is not a shocking limitation per se, but their marketing messaging has long been suggesting that they have a vision where developers will heavily use the power of their platform to build a wide range of real world applications both in the consumer and enterprise space. Or alternatively the interactive use case to iterate on a solution as part of R&D, which I believe is the main way people use their products. The only use case I can see for this is either very complex computations for which either no other vendor exists, or requiring so much resources to run that their platform is the most convenient option. But at that point you'd in practice rather use a more specialized (and much less expensive) solution. The only way to solve this problem would be to restrict your input to a fix format to make their output more predictable. This means that you'd have to re-implement non-trivial parts of their platform. Therefore, if you want to consume their service by leveraging the full smartness and cleverness of their platform, your consuming application needs to be equally smart and clever if you want to do anything more useful than displaying their raw output in an iframe. Their platform is so sophisticated that it produces output in a non-deterministic format depending on your search terms. This is an interesting paradox, I sometime call it the Wolfram paradox, here is what I mean: I've always found Wolfram Alpha surprisingly unhelpful and impossible to integrate into an enterprise application in a meaningful way in practice.
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