Most things that were considered shockingly inefficient in the 70s are faster than things we consider merely harmlessly inefficient today. :) In practice, Prol

Most things that were considered shockingly inefficient in the 70s are faster than things we consider merely harmlessly inefficient today. :) In practice, Prolog requires the programmer to have some understanding of how it's going to be executed. This is in contrast to SQL, which is intentionally high-level to allow the database to figure out the best strategy and does require a lot more in the backend. Mercury also finds this abhorrent, but Mercury is another sufficiently-smart situation and a bit more obtuse.