> When scraping HTML from Wikipedia, one is using general-purpose well-known tools. You'll get slightly better at whatever general-purpose programming language and libraries you were using, learn something that may be useful the next time you need to scrape something else. And most importantly, you know that you'll finish, you can see a path to success. When exploring something "alternative" like Wikidata, you aren't sure if it will work, so the alternative path needs to work harder to convince potential users of success.
I'm not sure its that clear. Scrapping is pretty generic, but SPARQL is hardly a proprietary query language - other things use it. If what you're into is obtaining data, sparql might more generically apply than scrapping would. It really depends on what you are doing in the future. At the very least if you do scrapping a lot, you're probably going to reinvent the parsing wheel a lot. To each their own.
> he's ignoring the work he invested in learning that query language (and where to query it), for instance
And Bill is ignoring the work of learning how to program. None of us start from nothing, and its not like any of this is trivial to learn if you've never touched a computer before.
And to be clear i'm not objecting - there is nothing wrong with using the skills you currently have to solve the problem you currently have. Whatever gets you the solution. If you're querying wikidata (or similar things) everyday, learning sparql is probably a good investment. If you're interested in sparql, then by all means learn it. But if those dont apply, then scrapping makes sense if you already know how to do that.
> [Scraping] is pretty generic, but SPARQL is hardly a proprietary query language - other things use it. If what you're into is obtaining data, sparql might more generically apply than [scraping] would. It really depends on what you are doing in the future.
Yes my point exactly! My point was that even when trying to consider the perspective of people different from us, we can end up writing for (and from the perspective of) people who are "into" the same things as us. Casual users like in the original scraping post are not much really "into" obtaining data, which can be a blind spot for enthusiasts who are. The challenge and opportunity in such cases is really communication with the outside of the field, rather than competition within the field.
Because SQL looks and is more simple: plain English words that are easily recognized, with basic queries (select from) that can be taught in less than an hour and then build on it. Now let's look at SPARQL: everything screams at technicality. Curly braces (I'm not sure a non-programmer even know how to type this). Then the variable name prefixed by ?. Then the need to understand what is an URI and how and why prefixes are declared, not to mention the sheer fact of using URI instead of a simple names such as one found for database columns. But even that isn't enough knowledge to start writing the simpliest query. One also need to be taught about RDF triples.
So no, every query languages are not born the same. SPARQL is overly technical and requires a lot of knowledge to do even the simpliest things.
Well one reason why someone might learn SQL without learning how to program is that you can get jobs for it.
Ah, but the response might go, lots of people learned SQL when there weren't a lot of jobs for people who knew SQL.
Yes, my response would be, but that was a long time ago and the incentives for people to learn technologies have changed, and I do not think a significant amount of people will learn SQL without learning to program henceforth; at least not amounts significant enough that anyone will say "Well look at that trend!".
here there can be several responses so I won't go through all the branches, but in the end I don't think there is going to be an interest in learning Sparql in people who are not programmers or at least programming adjacent professions, and from what I see there hasn't been that much interest from people who are programmers.
I'm not sure its that clear. Scrapping is pretty generic, but SPARQL is hardly a proprietary query language - other things use it. If what you're into is obtaining data, sparql might more generically apply than scrapping would. It really depends on what you are doing in the future. At the very least if you do scrapping a lot, you're probably going to reinvent the parsing wheel a lot. To each their own.
> he's ignoring the work he invested in learning that query language (and where to query it), for instance
And Bill is ignoring the work of learning how to program. None of us start from nothing, and its not like any of this is trivial to learn if you've never touched a computer before.
And to be clear i'm not objecting - there is nothing wrong with using the skills you currently have to solve the problem you currently have. Whatever gets you the solution. If you're querying wikidata (or similar things) everyday, learning sparql is probably a good investment. If you're interested in sparql, then by all means learn it. But if those dont apply, then scrapping makes sense if you already know how to do that.