38 karma · joined February 5, 2014
The common name for a descending clock auctions? "Dutch Auction" or "Tulip Auction". The irony is not lost on us...
I can assure you that we're as surprised as anyone at the speed that this thing has grown!
It was a joke, and I intended it to work regardless of your opinion of Perl and Larry Wall himself. With that said, my own opinion is that Larry Wall did a bunch of interesting things in Perl (some of them merely out of ignorance!), that continue to shape modern languages. The Perl community continues this tradition today experimenting with lots of different programming paradigms, to the benefit of the wider development world.
I shouldn't have tweaked Java so mercilessly since I did love the language for so long (lo, these many years ago). However, I do think you really underestimate the compile speed of Go. Even if 99% of your builds are incremental, you can't entirely discount the occasional clean build. While it has been many years since I hacked Java, even incremental builds could take more than a few seconds. Even a clean build on our 50 kloc Go codebase clocks in under 2 seconds (0.1s when the disk caches are pre-warmed).
As for generics, I do like them, and seeing them on iOS (with Swift) is a pretty big win. I'm not entirely convinced that Go is much poorer without them, however. The type system in Go is really unique; if you tried to program Go using Java-style paradigms, there's no question that you'd find it pretty disappointing. However, Go does allow some new ways of thinking about types that allow a degree of flexibility that simply can't be expressed with formal class hierarchies.
If what you're doing works for you, just keep on truckin'. But if you give some of these new languages a chance, you might find the areas where they really shine. We did!
That particular relationship is outside the goals of DBpedia, which is primarily intended to represent the "summary blocks" that appear in the upper-right corner of major pages on Wikipedia.
Freebase allows anyone to make new relationships, though, so you could go into Freebase today and encode those dependencies if you had sufficient source data. This leads to it's own problems! It's common in Freebase to find the same conceptual relationship encoded using multiple different relationship classes. For example, we've seen more than ten different ways of encoding geolocations within this one dataset!
Semantic Databases are remarkably flexible, but -- as with Javascript! -- this flexibility can be its own curse...