From the article "...with all its computational intelligence, algorithms, knowledgebase, and so on"

But the "its" that the article is referring to is the Wolfram Engine. It doesn't say that is all the algorithms in Mathematica. And the Mathematica website lists Algorithm Base and Wolfram Engine as two separate line items, which is at least surprising if one is contained in the other.

I actually believe the Algorithm Base is probably included, but it's definitely anything but clear from the website or any of the press release. The Mathematica website makes them seem like two completely separate unconnected components.

It's really unclear what is included in Wolfram Engine and what is included only in Mathematica... the above was just one obvious example. It would be very nice to have a concise list.

No, Unity allows commercial uses either for free in some circumstances, or very, very cheap, so long as your annual revenue is less than $2M.

That makes it a no-brainer to use--you pay little or no licensing fees until your game takes off. Unity makes their money off the unpredictable winners, while gifting a nearly free product to the hobbyist and startup ecosystem.

Wolfram Engine is more like the Epic Games (Unreal Engine) model: free to download and play around with, but steep licensing costs before you ship anything. No way to quickly iterate and try things, only paying up when an experiment works out.

UE4's pricing model is a lot like Unity's pricing model nowadays as far as I can tell.

Yes, they changed after Unity are their lunch.

Click the Download button on

https://www.wolfram.com/developer/

Its linked from the article.

I see, thank you. I must have clicked that link to sign up for a developer license, but somehow I don't remember being offered to download the thing.

I feel silly now, but that was pretty confusing.

I think there are people in applied math data science and statistics who use Windows and OSX.

Wolfram supports numeric computation too (optimization, PDE solvers, data science etc

>Most software is grounded in an open source

That depends on the software development segment. If you are creating 3D games you would expect to build on top of Unity or Unreal because unless you are a major studio building the infrastructure yourself is expensive, slow and not as good. The question is "is computation" such a segment?

IIRC, I think Unity source is available if you purchase the appropriate license level, but Wolfram source is not available at all.

Some things that Wolfram Language does that maxima doesn't: machine learning, image processing, audio processing, time series analysis, user interface construction, build-in data, geo computation, natural language processing....

Maxima is just a computer algebra system- one small part of what Wolfram does.

Are Maxima's CAS algorithms comparable to Mathematica's? I have tried to used Sage and other systems in the past, but Mathematica has always been better at finding solutions for what I tried to do. But I have never used Maxima for real.

Maxima is a serious CAS and can do serious work, but it’s a few decades behind the latest R&D. It can do algebra and calculus usefully.