Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

On Sat, 24 Nov 2018 at 13:36, William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Javascript frameworks (lets say react) for example is technically more
>
> difficult than RDF, but it keeps developer attention...  I cant answer why,
>
> but I can point out some differences.
>
> 1. *Canonical Documentation*.
> 2. *Beginner friendly tutorials*.
> 3. *Beginner friendly support*.
>
>
> These things are important but there is a basic difference with the next
> one:
>
> 4. *Building things*.  When learning JS you can right from the very start
> see
>
> what it does, and build things.
>
>
> Isn’t the difference here that RDF doesn’t “do” anything? It’s not a
> programming
> language it’s a way of writing down data. Data doesn’t do things. To get
> anything out of it at all you also need a programming language and some
> sort
> of library.
>
> Because there’s a fair amount to learn about RDF as a data language, and
> it’s
> much less obvious than, e.g. JSON, a new developer has to learn both a
> programming environment and a data environment. Maybe that’s twice as
> much effort or more.
>
> What do you think?
>

RDF is declarative.  It doesnt do anything on its own, but with the right
view it can indeed do lots of things.

Perhaps RDF was ahead of its time, but declarative models are coming more
and more into modern web programming.

What RDF can demonstrate quite well, I think, is the ability to mix
different data sources together.


>
> -w
>
>
>