Re: Plan3 — A Procedural RDF Programming Language

 Hi Sean -

You wrote...

*In sum, all of the mainstream bob-a-job programming languages are
imperative.
There is lots about RDF that is suited towards declarative programming, but
N3 took it too far.
*
Just to be contrarian, one can take declarativeness over RDF much further
than N3.  For an example you can run using a browser, please see

  www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent

For background (and why this is highly declarative), please see


www.reengineeringllc.com/A_Wiki_for_Business_Rules_in_Open_Vocabulary_Executable_English.pdf

Apologies if you have seen this before, and thanks for comments.

                                                    -- Adrian

Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and
RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    Shared use is free

Adrian Walker
Reengineering




On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Sean B. Palmer <sean@miscoranda.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
>
> > Could you explain that point?
>
> Yep, sure, though this'll probably be a bit of a ramble. In sum, all
> of the mainstream bob-a-job programming languages are imperative.
> There is lots about RDF that is suited towards declarative
> programming, but N3 took it too far.
>
> I haven't done any great survey about this à la my old N3 QNames
> survey, but experience tells me that RDF APIs tend to be developed in
> imperative languages because that's how people get things done.
>
> It's difficult to tell between trendiness and a good idea. Heck,
> sometimes even trendiness quâ trendiness is a good idea.
>
> Paul Graham says somewhere that languages like Java are an
> evolutionary dead end. Then again, he also says that the evolutionary
> victor will be lisp.
>
> The "novel" strangeness might not be novel from a universal
> perspective, and I didn't mean to imply that in my email if I did, but
> from a personal perspective it was something that nagged at me all the
> time. So I tried it out. Trying things out is what science is founded
> on, and computer science is no different.
>
> I've been working with N3 for years. I love N3; I love it dearly. But
> it's mad. So I tried plan3 and that was mad too, but in a different
> way. Then I tried Trio and Arcs, and that was mad too but in a
> *completely* different way.
>
> How can you tell that N3 is good (whatever that means) if you don't
> try other things?
>
> At the end of the day, for high-level architectural decisions people
> say things bourne out of long experience, and if Paul Graham goes and
> says something like "Java is a dead end, lisp is the future!", then
> it's an interesting point, and you might not agree, but the truth of a
> statement like that isn't the primary thing about it. It makes you
> think.
>
> Plan3 made me think; think *practically*. The declarative way of doing
> things in N3 really gets on my nerves, so hybridising the two really
> made sense. If the Semantic Web is successful on its putated terms,
> like if Tabulator and such things become a part of our daily lives as
> timbl once said, my bet is that N3 will be an evolutionary dead end,
> and that language like plan3 or Niklas's Ardele will be more suitable.
>
> But after all, cum grano salis, because plan3 and Ardele (from what I
> can tell from its syntax example; Niklas hasn't fully specified the
> design online yet) seem to aim for a 50:50 declarative-imperative
> split. Perhaps the sweetspot would be elsewhere, like 30:70.
>
> Note that it doesn't really concern me too much; it's outside of the
> realm of my personal interests at the moment. I just gave it as an
> example of what might be the primary value of me releasing this. I was
> thinking some people might say "what is the point of this?",
> otherwise. I think it's a good question to ask.
>
> (Sometimes the benefits of systems can be far off. Prime number
> research was just pure maths, pure intellectual fun, until we realised
> we could use it as the foundation of public key cryptography.)
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> --
> Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
>