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Great to see ongoing interest in Prolog. I did my Master's thesis in Prolog back in the "Fifth Generation" days [1] ... obviously the hype was waaaaay overstat

by jdp23 11y ago

Great to see ongoing interest in Prolog. I did my Master's thesis in Prolog back in the "Fifth Generation" days [1] ... obviously the hype was waaaaay overstated but it still significantly influenced my thinking. I really think of it as one of those languages like Lisp or ML that opens your mind even if you don't wind up using it in your day-to-day job. Plus, I thought it was entertaining to see this on the front page at the same time as "Hello, declarative world" :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_l... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10219780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10219780

deleted 11y ago
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samuell 11y ago
And I did mine more recently (2010) [1] :) (Mostly semantic web stuff ... showing how it can far outperform Java based SPARQL implementations for some stuff). It was a real joy to work with semantic web data in SWI-prolog! Prolog lets you raise your level of abstraction so quickly, as defining prolog rules basically is a form of creating "named queries", something that is not possible e.g. in SPARQL (the canonical semweb query language). I can't understand why this feature of prolog is not implemented more widely in more recent systems. The only example I know of that does, is Datomic [2], by Rich Hickey. [1] http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A398839&dswid=-8767 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A3988... [2] http://www.datomic.com http://www.datomic.com
- iso8859-1 11y ago
  How exactly can I use Prolog in Datomic? I only saw Datalog.
  - samuell 11y ago
    Yeah, I meant that it uses the ideas of "named queries" from prolog, which is included in the datalog IIUC.