Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web

A long time ago, my first useful experiments with using RDF were based on (after trying other tools) using Swi-Prolog's semantic web libraries. Since then, I have also been using other tools (mostly Sesame, some Jena, and some Franz's commercial AllegroGraph product - which I am planning on writing a short 'applications' book on, BTW, after I finish my Java AI book).

I noticed (see linked PDF paper) this morning that the RDFizing and Interlinking the EuroStat Data Set Effort (riese) architecture (diagram) uses Swi-Prolog on the back end. Very cool. The riese web site itself is interesting: human readable web pages with embedded RDFa for semantic web software agents. (Make sure you view page source on your browser.)

Labels: Prolog, semantic web

I bought Joe Armstrong's new Erlang book as a beta PDF early this year and have been enjoying the material (the book is now in print). Erlang definitely has a lot of hacker mindshare but I have been unable to convince my customers to use it (so far). This may be a generalization, but those of us who love to program in Prolog are very likely to also enjoy working with Erlang. Erlang is certainly a great tool but I think it is unlikely to be very popular for two reasons: it does not provide instant gratification like Ruby on Rails and there is no large company promoting it (e.g., like Sun, IBM, etc. promote Java). That said, Erlang has a great open source community behind it and learning Erlang is very worthwhile if you occasionally need scalable applications. A comparison with Java is interesting: Java (especially with the new concurrency support in JDK 6) scales well on single servers with large numbers of cores while Erlang probably has the advantage when scaling to multiple servers.

Labels: Erlang, Prolog