Two years ago we released Version 13.0 of Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in PDEs and system modeling since then, including the latest features in 14.0. The contents of this post are compiled from Stephen Wolfram’s Release Announcements for 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 and 14.0.

Paclet Repository

The Paclet Repository Arrives (January 2024)

Paclets are a technology we’ve used for more than a decade and a half to distribute updated functionality to Wolfram Language systems in the field. In Version 13 we began the process of providing tools for anyone to create paclets. And since Version 13 we’ve introduced the Wolfram Language Paclet Repository as a centralized repository for paclets:

What is a paclet? It’s a collection of Wolfram Language functionality—including function definitions, documentation, external libraries, stylesheets, palettes and more—that can be distributed as a unit, and immediately deployed in any Wolfram Language system.

The Paclet Repository is a centralized place where anyone can publish paclets for public distribution. So how does this relate to the Wolfram Function Repository? They are interestingly complementary—with different optimization and different setups. The Function Repository is more lightweight, the Paclet Repository more flexible. The Function Repository is for making available individual new functions, that independently fit into the whole existing structure of the Wolfram Language. The Paclet Repository is for making available larger-scale pieces of functionality, that can define a whole framework and environment of their own.

The Function Repository is also fully curated, with every function being reviewed by our team before it is posted. The Paclet Repository is an immediate-deployment system, without pre-publication review. In the Function Repository every function is specified just by its name—and our review team is responsible for ensuring that names are well chosen and have no conflicts. In the Paclet Repository, every contributor gets their own namespace, and all their functions and other material live inside that namespace. So, for example, I contributed the function RandomHypergraph to the Function Repository, which can be accessed just as ResourceFunction["RandomHypergraph"]. But if I had put this function in a paclet in the Paclet Repository, it would have to be accessed as something like PacletSymbol["StephenWolfram/Hypergraphs", "RandomHypergraph"].

PacletSymbol, by the way, is a convenient way of “deep accessing” individual functions inside a paclet. PacletSymbol temporarily installs (and loads) a paclet so that you can access a particular symbol in it. But more often one wants to permanently install a paclet (using PacletInstall), then explicitly load its contents (using Needs) whenever one wants to have its symbols available. (All the various ancillary elements, like documentation, stylesheets, etc. in a paclet get set up when it is installed.)

What does a paclet look like in the Paclet Repository? Every paclet has a home page that typically includes an overall summary, a guide to the functions in the paclet, and some overall examples of the paclet:

Individual functions typically have their own documentation pages:

Just like in the main Wolfram Language documentation, there can be a whole hierarchy of guide pages, and there can be things like tutorials.

Notice that in examples in paclet documentation, one often sees constructs like . These represent symbols in the paclet, presented in forms like PacletSymbol["WolframChemistry/ProteinVisualization", "AmidePlanePlot"] that allow these symbols to be accessed in a “standalone” way. If you directly evaluate such a form, by the way, it’ll force (temporary) installation of the paclet, then return the actual, raw symbol that appears in the paclet:

So how does one create a paclet suitable for submission to the Paclet Repository? You can do it purely programmatically, or you can start from File > New > Repository Item > Paclet Repository Item, which launches what amounts to a whole paclet creation IDE. The first step is to specify where you want to assemble your paclet. You give some basic information

then a Paclet Resource Definition Notebook is created, from which you can give function definitions, set up documentation pages, specify what you want your paclet’s home page to be like, etc.:

There are lots of sophisticated tools that let you create full-featured paclets with the same kind of breadth and depth of capabilities that you find in the Wolfram Language itself. For example, Documentation Tools lets you construct full-featured documentation pages (function pages, guide pages, tutorials, …):

Once you’ve assembled a paclet, you can check it, build it, deploy it privately—or submit it to the Paclet Repository. And once you submit it, it will automatically get set up on the Paclet Repository servers, and within just a few minutes the pages you’ve created describing your paclet will show up on the Paclet Repository website.

So what’s in the Paclet Repository so far? There’s a lot of good and very serious stuff, contributed both by teams at our company and by members of the broader Wolfram Language community. In fact, many of the 134 paclets now in the Paclet Repository have enough in them that there’s a whole piece like this that one could write about them.

One category of things you’ll find in the Paclet Repository are snapshots of our ongoing internal development projects—many of which will eventually become built-in parts of the Wolfram Language. A good example of this is our LLM and Chat Notebook functionality, whose rapid development and deployment over the past year was made possible by the use of the Paclet Repository. Another example, representing ongoing work from our chemistry team (AKA WolframChemistry in the Paclet Repository) is the ChemistryFunctions paclet, which contains functions like:

And, yes, this is interactive:

Or, also from WolframChemistry:

Another “development snapshot” is DiffTools—a paclet for making and viewing diffs between strings, cells, notebooks, etc.:

A major paclet is QuantumFramework—which provides the functionality for our Wolfram Quantum Framework

and delivers broad support for quantum computing (with at least a few connections to multiway systems and our Physics Project):

Talking of our Physics Project, there are over 200 functions supporting it that are in the Wolfram Function Repository. But there are also paclets, like WolframInstitute/Hypergraph:

An example of an externally contributed package is Automata—with more than 250 functions for doing computations related to finite automata:

Another contributed paclet is FunctionalParsers, which goes from a symbolic parser specification to an actual parser, here being used in a reverse mode to generate random “sentences”:

Phi4Tools is a more specialized paclet, for working with Feynman diagrams in field theory:

And, as another example, here’s MaXrd, for crystallography and x-ray scattering:

As just one more example, there’s the Organizer paclet—a utility paclet for making and manipulating organizer notebooks. But unlike the other paclets we’ve seen here, it doesn’t expose any Wolfram Language functions; instead, when you install it, it puts a palette in your Palettes list:

Prompt Repository

The LLMs Have Landed (January 2024)

You can define your own LLM functions in Wolfram Language. But there’s also the Wolfram Prompt Repository that plays a similar role for LLM functions as the Wolfram Function Repository does for ordinary Wolfram Language functions. There’s a public Prompt Repository that so far has several hundred curated prompts. But it’s also possible for anyone to post their prompts in the Wolfram Cloud and make them publicly (or privately) accessible. The prompts can define personas (“talk like a [stereotypical] pirate”). They can define AI-oriented functions (“write it with emoji”). And they can define modifiers that affect the form of output (“haiku style”).

LLM Tech Comes to Wolfram Language (June 2023)

Ultimately personas are mostly just special prompts for the LLM (together, sometimes with tools, etc.) And one of the new things we’ve recently launched to support LLMs is the Wolfram Prompt Repository:

The Prompt Repository contains several kinds of prompts. The first are personas, which are used to “style” and otherwise inform chat interactions. But then there are two other types of prompts: function prompts, and modifier prompts.

Function prompts are for getting the LLM to do something specific, like summarize a piece of text, or suggest a joke (it’s not terribly good at that). Modifier prompts are for determining how the LLM should modify its output, for example translating into a different human language, or keeping it to a certain length.

You can pull in function prompts from the repository into a Chat Notebook by using !, and modifier prompts using #. There’s also a ^ notation for saying that you want the “input” to the function prompt to be the cell above:

This is how you can access LLM functionality from within a Chat Notebook. But there’s also a whole symbolic programmatic way to access LLMs that we’ve added to the Wolfram Language. Central to this is LLMFunction, which acts very much like a Wolfram Language pure function, except that it gets “evaluated” not by the Wolfram Language kernel, but by an LLM:

You can access a function prompt from the Prompt Repository using LLMResourceFunction:

Wolfram Function Repository

Wolfram Function Repository: 2900 Functions & Counting (January 2024)

The Wolfram Function Repository has been a big success. We introduced it in 2019 as a way to make specific, individual contributed functions available in the Wolfram Language. And now there are more than 2900 such functions in the Repository.

The nearly 7000 functions that constitute the Wolfram Language as it is today have been painstakingly developed over the past three and a half decades, always mindful of creating a coherent whole with consistent design principles. And now in a sense the success of the Function Repository is one of the dividends of all that effort. Because it’s the coherence and consistency of the underlying language and its design principles that make it feasible to just add one function at a time, and have it really work. You want to add a function to do some very specific operation that combines images and graphs. Well, there’s a consistent representation of both images and graphs in the Wolfram Language, which you can leverage. And by following the principles of the Wolfram Language—like for the naming of functions—you can create a function that’ll be easy for Wolfram Language users to understand and use.

Using the Wolfram Function Repository is a remarkably seamless process. If you know the function’s name, you can just call it using ResourceFunction; the function will be loaded if it’s needed, and then it’ll just run:

If there’s an update available for the function, it’ll give you a message, but run the old version anyway. The message has a button that lets you load in the update; then you can rerun your input and use the new version. (If you’re writing code where you want to “burn in” a particular version of a function, you can just use the ResourceVersion option of ResourceFunction.)

If you want your code to look more elegant, just evaluate the ResourceFunction object

and use the formatted version:

And, by the way, pressing the + then gives you more information about the function:

An important feature of functions in the Function Repository is that they all have documentation pages—that are organized pretty much like the pages for built-in functions:

But how does one create a Function Repository entry? Just go to File > New > Repository Item > Function Repository Item and you’ll get a Definition Notebook:

We’ve optimized this to be as easy to fill in as possible, minimizing boilerplate and automatically checking for correctness and consistency whenever possible. And the result is that it’s perfectly realistic to create a simple Function Repository item in under an hour—with the main time spent being in the writing of good expository examples.

When you press Submit to Repository your function gets sent to the Wolfram Function Repository review team, whose mandate is to ensure that functions in the repository do what they say they do, work in a way that is consistent with general Wolfram Language design principles, have good names, and are adequately documented. Except for very specialized functions, the goal is to finish reviews within a week (and sometimes considerably sooner)—and to publish functions as soon as they are ready.

There’s a digest of new (and updated) functions in the Function Repository that gets sent out every Friday—and makes for interesting reading (you can subscribe here):

The Wolfram Function Repository is a curated public resource that can be accessed from any Wolfram Language system (and, by the way, the source code for every function is available—just press the Source Notebook button). But there’s another important use case for the infrastructure of the Function Repository: privately deployed “resource functions”.

It all works through the Wolfram Cloud. You use the exact same Definition Notebook, but now instead of submitting to the public Wolfram Function Repository, you just deploy your function to the Wolfram Cloud. You can make it private so that only you, or some specific group, can access it. Or you can make it public, so anyone who knows its URL can immediately access and use it in their Wolfram Language system.

This turns out to be a tremendously useful mechanism, both for group projects, and for creating published material. In a sense it’s a very lightweight but robust way to distribute code—packaged into functions that can immediately be used. (By the way, to find the functions you’ve published from your Wolfram Cloud account, just go to the DeployedResources folder in the cloud file browser.)

(For organizations that want to manage their own function repository, it’s worth mentioning that the whole Wolfram Function Repository mechanism—including the infrastructure for doing reviews, etc.—is also available in a private form through the Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud.)

So what’s in the public Wolfram Function Repository? There are a lot of “specialty functions” intended for specific “niche” purposes—but very useful if they’re what you want:

There are functions that add various kinds of visualizations:

Some functions set up user interfaces:

Some functions link to external services:

Some functions provide simple utilities:

There are also functions that are being explored for potential inclusion in the core system:

There are also lots of “leading-edge” functions, added as part of research or exploratory development. And for example in pieces I write (including this one), I make a point of having all pictures and other output be backed by “click-to-copy” code that reproduces them—and this code quite often contains functions either from the public Wolfram Function Repository or from (publicly accessible) private deployments.