I am at a point where I need to increase subscription prices. I tried to approach this from different angles, but eventually settled for a practical way to look at it: What services do I use personally and how much do they cost?

• Zoom: ~12 Euro/month
• Grammarly: 12 Euro/month
• Adobe Photoshop: 23 Euro/month
• Midjourney: 30 Euro/month
• Adobe Lightroom: 12 Euro/month
• Minecraft Realm for the kids: 7 Euro/month
• Netflix: 18 Euro/month

The median of above subscription fees is 12 Euro. It will be the base for the new pricing scheme and compared to the current personal license costs of 3 Euro per month gives a factor of 4. Therefore, in the next weeks, the pricing of Wolfram Language Plugin will be adjusted to:

• 12 Euro/month or 120 Euro/year for a personal license.
• 48 Euro/month or 480 Euro/year for a commercial license.

Current customers will not lose their 20% or 40% discounts on the new prices!

I understand that price increases are something none of us likes and I thank you for your understanding. If you have any questions about the changes or need clarification, please feel free to reach out using the following email:

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Firstly, the 2020 release comes with support for the Wolfram Language 12.1 and includes all its functions, options and documentation right at your fingertips. The extraction of all this information from a new version of Mathematica is always a challenge since you need to access options, usages, and attributes for thousands of built-in symbols and bring everything into a consistent format. My friend Szabolcs Horvát helped quite a bit in this endeavor, and we were able to almost completely rewrite how we can automatically extract information about Mathematica’s symbols. The package is available on GitHub and if you’re interested how you can turn a Mathematica usage message into HTML, you should have a look at it.

If you haven’t seen it already, you can display the usage message of your own functions by using “Quick Documentation” (Ctrl + Q on Linux and Windows) when your cursor is over any usage of the function. Note that the package-wide (and across packages) resolution of symbols also relies on the existence of usage messages. So when you have defined a function with a usage message in file A and you are using it in a file B, you can navigate to the definition by pressing Ctrl + B.

Another feature that is mostly unknown is that Wolfram introduced an alternative and especially for beginners easier way to define which symbols in a package are private, which are package-wide symbols, and which will be exported for direct use to the end-user. I’m not going into details here, but you can read this StackExchange post or look into the package SystemFiles/Components/HTTPHandling/Main.m in your Mathematica 12.1 installation for examples. To give you the gist: It simplifies the handling of contexts inside packages by introducing static directives Package, PackageScope, and PackageExport that you can use to define which symbols are package-private or exported. The plugin recognizes this new package format and provides highlighting, autocompletion and resolving of the arguments you provide to the new package directives.

Another thing you might have missed is that the WLP integrates into IntelliJ’s markdown capabilities and lets you use fenced codeblocks that are tagged with wl or mathematica. That means, you get syntax highlighting for Wolfram Language code directly within a markdown file. As you can see in the screenshot below, it supports advanced syntax highlighting like coloring of local variables.

Have you tried the “Show Parentheses” feature you find in the Wolfram Language menu entry? It displays your code with additional parentheses and lets you quickly see the order of evaluation. This is a temporary display that you can exit by pressing Esc.

Other small improvements include that you can now open notebooks directly from within IDEA, and it will use your operating system to find the Mathematica installation used for opening the file. The folding of code was also extended to more places since users seem to love folding their code.

In the end, I would like to clear things about licencing up once more since I heard that a few users were disappointed that the WLP is not open-source anymore. Since last year, the WLP is available on the Jetbrains Marketplace, and you need a free, or a paid license to use it. That was a step I planned for a long time and I explained in detail why it was necessary:

why change the Wolfram Language Plugin from a free, open-source project to a paid service? Back in 2012, I was hoping it can be a community project with several people working on the code. However, it is 2019, I’m still working alone, and it’s safe to say that this plan has failed. Maintaining code, developing new features, and taking care of the website and user communication takes a good portion of my free time. If the revenue from the subscriptions helps me to pay the bills, I can set apart more official time to work on the plugin. If this works out, the users will benefit because when more time is spent on the plugin, the quality of features and documentation will increase.

With over 80k downloads, and the plugin working on 16 of Jetbrain’s major IDEs, it should be obvious maintaining the WLP is more than just a small side-project.

Also, some users have been confused, because there was no need for a license until the end of 2019 although the plugin was already on the Jetbrains Marketplace. The reason is that the Marketplace wasn’t ready for IntelliJ Community products, and there were two choices: Give the WLP for free for the time being or don’t allow it on IntelliJ Community products. I decided for the first option so that users of, e.g. Community IDEA could use the WLP on an “extended trial”.

The WLP specifically targets package developers who build polished packages that they usually want to distribute either open-source or professionally. Open-source developers, students, people from academia, or teachers working in a classroom can get a free license for the WLP. Therefore, the paid licenses are for professionals or companies who make money with their work. By sharing some of their revenue, I get something back for my time and with paying customers, it’s my obligation to set aside time for maintaining the plugin. It’s a win-win for everyone.

However, when the Marketplace went online, many features were still work-in-progress, and the framework that manages licenses was only available on Ultimate products (IDEA Ultimate, PyCharm Professional, etc). Therefore, right from the beginning, all users of Ultimate IDEs needed to have a valid license for the WLP to use it.

For all the free Jetbrains Community products, license management was still under development which meant I could either turn the support for Community products off entirely or leave everything freely accessible for the time being. I chose the latter option and users of Jetbrains Community products could get the Wolfram Language Plugin and all updates in an “extended trial period” as long as Jetbrains needed to bring license-checks to these IDEs.

Shortly before the 24th of December, Jetbrains made a Christmas gift to all its 3rd-party plugin developers by finally implementing support for Marketplace licensing on Community products. That means that starting now, everyone who wants to use the Wolfram Language Plugin will need to get a license. I have given all details about which paid and free license-options exist in the documentation.

Although there was no requirement to have a license until now, some users still chose to support the plugin development directly by subscribing to one of the licensing options. Basically right after the Marketplace went online, the WLP had a steady stream of people interested in getting a license for it. Here is a plot which shows the accumulated number of licenses from when the Marketplace was available:

As you can see, there was a bit of a dry spell during September and a big bump during November. I guess the increase of licenses in November can be attributed to Stephen Wolfram mentioning the plugin during his keynote talk at the Wolfram Technology Conference earlier in October.

What I was also interested in is where the plugin users that have a license come from. Therefore, I created a location map that shows where the licensees are located and colorized countries depending on the number of licenses:

As you can see, most of them are from the US which was to be expected with Wolfram Research having their headquarters there. Very surprising to me and absolutely awesome is that there are Wolfram Language Plugin users in Isreal. Overall, there are currently 51 users with an official paid or free license, and it might be interesting to see how this relates to the downloads of the Wolfram Language Plugin.

Below you find the exact statistics for unique downloads of the plugin version 2019.3 which came out on 2nd of December 2019. Here, unique means that downloading the plugin several times is only counted once.

As expected there is a big bump right after publishing the version when all existing users update their WLP. After that, it usually slowly decreases to a constant number of downloads from new people that want to test the WLP. The accumulated download statistics for WLP 2019.3 looks like this:

Overall, we have about 750 downloads for version 2019.3 in 28 days with a median of 27 downloads per day. For such a niche product that targets mostly Mathematica package developers, I guess this is not too bad.

So what’s the plan for 2020? We have some issues that require attention and while most of them are non-critical, there are interesting points for improving the MLP. The documentation on the website, however, is still in a rudimentary state, and I will make it my New Year’s resolution to improve it. See you all in the next decade, and I hope every one of you has a nice New Year’s Eve.

Reinstate support for IDE’s like PyCharm, CLion, WebStorm, …

In version 2019.2, the IntelliJ API changed quite a bit. In order to support not only IntelliJ IDEA, but other IDE’s as well, some code and the dependencies on IDEA classes needed to be fixed. As some of you might have experienced, I did not succeed doing so in the first version of 2019.2. However, last night, I published an updated version 2019.2.1 which should now be compatible with all of the main IntelliJ-based products.

To give you a glimpse behind the scenes why this is necessary at all: IntelliJ IDEA is full featured and supports many things that are not part of other IDE’s. For instance, the module-system that lets you bundle logical parts of your code might not be part of other IDE’s. To make the plugin work in, e.g. PyCharm, these dependencies must now be marked as optional which means that I had to analyse the plugin code and find out which of the features are problematic.

Since this was also new to me, it took some time to understand the exact workflow. With version 2019.2.1, everything should now be set-up and the plugin will be as usual available for all IntelliJ-based IDE’s.

Completion provider for static string arguments

One nice feature request was the support of defined string arguments. That means, if you have a function that takes strings as accessor to select certain actions, you can now use the new completion provider to insert them automatically. Here is an example

colorFunc[x_?NumericQ] := With[{xx = Mod[x, 1]}, Blend[{Red, Blue, Green}, x]];
colorFunc["Description"] := "A color-scheme of the 3 basic color red, green, and blue";
colorFunc["Colors"] := {Red, Blue, Green};
colorFunc["Panel"] := Panel[Row@Table[colorFunc[x], {x, 0, 1, .1}]]

When coding something like this, one might forget which strings were used to access certain information. With the new smart completion, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+Space inside the brackets of colorFunc and you will get a pop-up window that lets you insert available string arguments

At the moment, this feature is not particularly clever. It simply collects all string arguments from usages of the function. Also, it uses only a basic insert handler, you it doesn’t work correctly, if you already opened the string quotes. Best to use it, when you haven’t typed anything at the place where you want to insert the string. Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+Space and insert the argument.

Support for Wolfram Script files

Support for Wolfram Language Script was added. In detail this means, you can (a) create .wls files and they are recognized by the plugin and (b) the shebang which is part of shell-scripts is parsed as a comment:

Several fixes for creating files with template code

In the past, some users complained that the entry for new Wolfram files in the pop-up menu is near the bottom. I have reworked this whole feature and now, when you go to your file tree and press Alt+Insert, you have the Wolfram entry near the top. Additionally, you can insert standard files like the PacletInfo.m directly from the new menu

Finally, a bug that didn’t allow you to create .wl files (they were created as .wl.m files) is fixed now. So when you create a Wolfram file, you have two choices:

1. you can simply give the name without an extension and the plugin will append .m to files, .mt to tests, and .wls to Wolfram Script files
2. you specify one of valid extensions explicitly (.m, .wl. .mt, .wlt, .wls)

Although the development remained a one-person job, the Wolfram Language Plugin was surprisingly well-received by its users. It was downloaded over 60.000 times, and it is used in large packages like IGraphM by Szabolcs Horvat successfully. Currently, the Wolfram Language Plugin has around 1000 downloads per month, and I’m glad that its users like it.

Today, I’m happy to announce that the next version of the Wolfram Language Plugin is available for IntelliJ platform based products versions 2019.1. That means it works for current versions of IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, CLion, and others. From now on, the plugin will also be available through the new JetBrains Marketplace which was initially released earlier this month and will be polished in the upcoming weeks.

The JetBrains Marketplace

Like iTunes or the Google Play store, the JetBrains Marketplace allows 3rd party developers to license their plugins and get revenue from user’s subscriptions. The advantage for developers like me is that everything will (soon) be entirely integrated into the IntelliJ ecosystem, making a lot of things easier. In particular, this means JetBrains handles licensing and user-management, which will also come to the advantage of the end-user. Installing and updating plugins will be as easy as before.

But why change the Wolfram Language Plugin from a free, open-source project to a paid service? Back in 2012, I was hoping it can be a community project with several people working on the code. However, it is 2019, I’m still working alone, and it’s safe to say that this plan has failed. Maintaining code, developing new features, and taking care of the website and user communication takes a good portion of my free time. If the revenue from the subscriptions helps me to pay the bills, I can set apart more official time to work on the plugin. If this works out, the users will benefit because when more time is spent on the plugin, the quality of features and documentation will increase. In the following, I will answer the most pressing questions.

Who has to pay how much?

There will be a subscription fee for commercial and private licenses. So when you use the plugin to develop projects that you don’t share as open source, or you use it within your business, you have to pay a subscription fee. I have chosen a very moderate pricing scheme of 3 Euro per month for private and 12 Euro per month for business licenses. If you pay for one year upfront, the fee will only be reduced to 10 times the monthly fee, i.e. 30 Euros and 120 Euros per year respectively.

Will there be free licenses?

Yes. When the JetBrains Marketplace is finalized, you will be able to apply for many special offers which include free licenses for open-source projects, students, teachers, training courses, etc. Additionally, there will be reduced offers for a wide range of other uses and, of course, there is a free 30-day trial. To sum it up, the Wolfram Language Plugin will support all special offers that are also available for IntelliJ IDEA.

What is the current status?

The JetBrains Marketplace is not finalized yet and things like applying for an open-source license are still worked on. At the moment, the licensing works for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate only. I have not implemented any countermeasures for other platforms, and you can use the Wolfram Language Plugin on other supported IDEs for free for the time being. I estimate it will take a couple of months for JetBrains to finalize the Marketplace for all products and until then, I would be delighted if as many people as possible try and test the Wolfram Language Plugin.

There will probably some more bumps along the road in the next weeks, so please be patient with me if we hit any. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the new version, the Marketplace, licensing, or documentation, please post in the LinkedIn group group or visit the Gitter chat.

The most obvious change is that the plugin got renamed to Wolfram Language Plugin to match the name of Mathematica’s programming language which was re-branded some years ago. Additionally, the plugin got a new logo which will from now on be used consistently throughout the IDE

However, these are by far the smallest changes and a lot of the improvements happened on the inside. For the past 2 years, a lot of the core functionality of the plugin was re-structured and re-implemented. This change was necessary to allow for the development of current features which rely much more on the internal representation of your code. That being said, the new version of the Wolfram Language plugin will contain features such as cross-file completion, attaching packages to your project for enhanced code-insight, and much more. Once the release is finalized, I will document all essential changes in detail so that you can get the best coding experience.

As you see right now, I also built a new website which can be edited easily and allows me to write markdown. Instead of using Joomla, this website is built with the static site generator Jekyll and the plan is to have all crucial resources like documentation and a news-blog in one place.

The Wolfram Language Plugin 2019 will be one of the first plugins published through the upcoming JetBrains Marketplace. The marketplace allows 3rd party developers like me to license their plugin directly through the usual plugin repository and receive subscription fees for certain license types. I have chosen a very light-weight plan for the prizes which only charges people who are working on private projects or people who use the plugin in their business. Like IntelliJ IDEA itself, the Wolfram Language Plugin will still be free of charge for open-source developers, educators or students and there is a long list of special offers for all kinds of situations. If you look at the table of special offers, you’ll find that there are a lot of opportunities to get the plugin free of charge. I hope that enough people choose to subscribe to a private license so that the revenue helps to pay the bills and I’m able to work more officially on the Wolfram Language Plugin.

In the next weeks, the goal is to publish the new version of the Wolfram Language Plugin and to make it available to everyone. There are still some bumps along the road, but I’m working on it.