Wolfram Research is announcing new efforts to give developers access to its computational programming language, the Wolfram Language. The company announced the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers, an engine for the Wolfram Language capable of being deployed on any system and called from programs, languages and web services, Wolfram Research explained.

According to the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research Stephen Wolfram, the engine implements the language as a software component, allowing it to be plugged into standard software engineers stacks, run from standard platforms, and called from programming languages.

“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,” Wolfram wrote in a blog. “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.”

According to Wolfram, the beauty of the language is it enables programmers to express things in a computational way, “It’s not just a language for telling computers what to do. It’s a language that both computers and humans can use to represent computational ways of thinking about things. It’s a language that puts into concrete form a computational view of everything. It’s a language that lets one use the computational paradigm as a framework for formulating and organizing one’s thoughts,” Wolfram wrote in a post.

In addition, the company announced developers can now access Wolfram’s computation programming language directly from Python with the new Wolfram Client Library for Python. According to the company, the client library is fully open sourced and designed to enable Python programs to take advantage of Wolfram’s language capabilities.

“The Wolfram Language gives programmers a unique computational language with an enormous array of sophisticated algorithms and built-in real-world knowledge. For many years, people have asked us how to access all the power of our technology from other software environments and programming languages,” the company wrote in a blog post.

By enabling Python programs to access the programming languages, developers can easily integrate Wolfram algorithms and Knowledgebase directly and use the language’s natural language understanding in Python. “This saves you considerable time and effort when developing new code,” the team explained.

Python developers can access the Wolfram language through a local Wolfram Engine or Wolfram Cloud. The library requires Python 3.5.3 or higher and Wolfram Language 11.3 or or higher.

According to its GitHub page, other features include the ability to:

  • evaluate arbitrary code on a local kernel,
  • evaluate arbitrary code on Wolfram cloud, public or private,
  • call deployed APIFunction,
  • build Python functions on top of Wolfram Language functions,
  • represent arbitrary Wolfram Language code as Python object,
  • serialize Python object to Wolfram Language string InputForm,
  • serialize Python object to WXF,
  • extend serialization to any arbitrary Python class,
  • parse WXF encoded expressions.