RE: A certain difficulty

By the way, I've worked with highly abstract languages such as Lisp and
Smalltalk for a long time. I hated C++ because it didn't support
reification. People without that kind of experience, on the other hand,
general experience cranial explosion when they encounter reification,
metaclass hierarchies, and the like. I certainly did the first hundred times
I tried to understand the top of the Smalltalk-80 class hierarchy!

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Sussna 
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 1:12 PM
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Subject: RE: A certain difficulty


I agree with many of the statements in this thread. In particular:

1. Modeling is hard
2. RDF syntax does not match the simplicity/clarity/elegance of RDF model

I think this all points to the fact that the Semantic Web will be much
harder to implement than the web we currently have. Part of the reason for
the explosion of the web as we know it is that HTML does not require good
abstraction skills. In fact it hinders good abstraction.

Given this, I still believe that the RDF syntax is not truly
property-centric, and therefore makes the RDF model harder to work with in
practice.

Jeff Sussna

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 18:08:09 UTC