Re: RDF.ex

I’m not sure either, if this is the right place for such a discussion and would like to mention on this occasion the Google Group for RDF.ex, which I forgot in my announcement: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/rdfex

Having visited some Elixir conferences, my impression is that it’s not just a vocal minority. The Elixir conferences and their numbers of participants are growing rapidly and a very large percentage of the participants are Rubyists. I am myself a Rubyist and couldn’t imagine becoming equally enthusiastic about another language. And now, after almost a year of Elixir, I have to admit that I’m getting slightly disappointed, when I have to do Ruby instead of Elixir for my day job.

Regarding your question, I'm actually not very qualified to answer that, but I don't see how Ruby could catch up with Python's huge development leap in these fields. The languages are too similar, that there's no real technical benefit Ruby could bring to the table over Python.

Although some people say Erlang/Elixir are not very suitable for the required number crunching, many oppose that claim and I (being obviously quite biased) have more hope for Elixir to get more traction in these fields, with Erlangs performance characteristics and the usability of a language like Ruby. With the recently released Flow (<https://github.com/elixir-lang/flow>) and GenStage (<https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage>) libraries, Elixir now offers something similar to Apache Spark and Hadoop nearly on the language level (currently for single nodes only), which would make it IMO a perfect fit for many of this issues. At least I am sure this will benefit in the further development of RDF.ex, e.g. in a query processor (to be done).

But in the end its probably not a technical question, but one of the language adoption in certain communities. 

Best,
Marcel

> On 27. Jun 2017, at 16:13, Anthony Durity <a.durity@umail.ucc.ie> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Marcel,
> 
> Certainly a vocal minority of the Ruby community have been making noises about Elixir. I wonder, though, exactly what percentage have jumped ship.
> 
> Personally, I'd love to hear news about how Ruby can be used in the world of Text Analytics, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Computational Linguistics. I think these are all adjacent to Semantic Web technologies. Every time I hear about some cool project (the last being Open Multilingual Wordnet, for instance) there's always a pointer to a Python or Java implementation or interface.
> 
> Don't know how relevant this comment is to the group, thought I'd share anyway.
> 
> Best,
>     Anthony
> 
> On 25 Jun 2017 23:17, "Marcel Otto" <marcelotto@gmx.de <mailto:marcelotto@gmx.de>> wrote:
> I've just released the first version of RDF.ex, an implementation of RDF for the Elixir programming language: https://github.com/marcelotto/rdf-ex <https://github.com/marcelotto/rdf-ex>
>  
> It is strongly inspired by RDF.rb. Supported serialization formats at the moment:
>  
> - N-Triples and N-Quads (as part of the core RDF.ex project)
> - JSON-LD as a separate project: https://github.com/marcelotto/jsonld-ex <https://github.com/marcelotto/jsonld-ex>
>  
> Since many Ruby programmers are also interested in Elixir, I thought this would be the best place for the announcement. If you know a better place to spread the word about the project in the Semantic Web community, please let me know.
>  
> Thank you,
> Marcel
> 
>  
>