- From: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 23:31:47 +0100
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: RDF Working Group <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On 10 May 2012, at 22:59, Sandro Hawke wrote: >> On the other hand, someone who has to learn a completely new language > > My sense is that people moving between Turtle and SPARQL wont think of > it as a completely new language. Particularly if they learned SPARQL > first, then Turtle is effectively just a subset of Turtle. But in > either case, I think it will often seem like one language, where SPARQL > just involves using a bunch of extra features of the language. Yes, I agree, and that's a good thing. What I meant was, someone who is new to this Turtle+SPARQL won't be greatly bothered by the extra characters that they *sometimes* have to use. It's a random little WTF, but every technology has its random little WTFs. > I suppose that depends a lot on the context. In a SemWeb context, > they're often learning so much other stuff --- well, things like > httpRange-14 draw a lot more heat than @prefix, it's true. Right — the RDF world has a couple of random giant WTFs! > I hear that you don't think it bothers users very much (so not a big > reason to change), but I'm not catching what you see as the reason not > to do the change. Just the work, or something else? Well, change *always* has a cost. There's the obvious cost to the WG and to implementers, but there's also a cost for these new users who supposedly will benefit from the change. They will still be confronted with old data, old systems, old books, and old *people* (us!) who still use the old syntax. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is ugly but not broken. Best, Richard
Received on Thursday, 10 May 2012 22:32:17 UTC