[Developers] attributes of properties?

[Tim Sturge]

Hi John,

Welcome to Freebase!

I agree that "key" and /type/key have special behaviour in MQL. They are 
important and common enough to be optimized internally. Hopefully the 
power they bring (the hierarchical path in an id like 
"/common/topic/article" or "/wikipedia/en/Anarchism") makes up for the 
slight inconsistencies in syntax.

My belief is that most languages are stuck with inconsistencies in 
various places and the best you can do is try to minimize the impact on 
the language user. Some very popular languages (Perl and SQL are two 
good examples) have horribly inconsistent syntax, but are in common use 
and considered "easy to use" while others (Lisp is the classic case) 
have a very small and consistent syntax but aren't used that commonly 
and are considered "hard to learn".

I'm also curious as to what you mean by "out of band attributes of 
properties". The closest thing I think MQL has to that is the "link" 
pseudo-property which enables you to examine the internal information of 
a particular property instance (such as who created it and when they did 
so.) This too is somewhat syntatically inconsistent (for example, "link" 
is not a property of any type.)

Thanks for your comments,

Tim

John Pritchard wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Skipping a personal introduction, I'll jump right into some first 
> thoughts on a look into MetaWeb. 
>
> I like it, but.. MetaWeb appears (to me) to be in need of some "out of 
> band" "attributes of properties".  This is usually where "type" would 
> live, but is best illustrated in the MetaWeb case by "key".  It seems 
> to me, in my humble opinion (ie, without much study), that the "key" 
> thing is a bit messy.
>
> Comments?
>
>
> Cheers all,
>
> John
>
>
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