9 ms·

Who Killed Prolog? (2010)

82 points by ihsoj 8y ago

eadmund 8y ago
Interesting idea that FGCS hype killed Prolog; on the Lisp side, we tend to think that AI hype killed Lisp. Also interesting that the author considers Prolog a competitor to Lisp, when (I think) most programmers don't even think of Prolog. Similarly, while we Lisp programmers think of Algol-like languages as our great competitors, I daresay the vast majority of C, Python, C++, Perl, Java, Go &c. programmers don't even think of Lisp. I think one can just run a Prolog engine in Lisp these days, which would get one the best of both worlds. But I'm not a Prolog programmer, so … perhaps I'm incorrect.
- yourapostasy 8y ago
  You can run Prolog inside Common Lisp: https://www.cliki.net/prolog https://www.cliki.net/prolog I don't know how good those implementations are compared to dedicated Prolog environments, though.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    And you can run Common Lisp inside prolog: https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp
    - kazagistar 8y ago
      And you can't run a JVM in either, so now we know that Java is the best. Or maybe that this measure was pointless?
      - profalseidol 8y ago
        There's Prolog in Java via GNU Prolog for Java: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuprologjava/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuprologjava/ We can use that to run Common Lisp which can run Prolog. Lmao
        kazagistar 8y ago
        If you reread my comment, you will notice my claim was the other way around. I was trying to point out that the encompassing argument is pointless but showing that neither lisp nor prolog can evaluate full Java code (because the reverse is certainly assumed to be possiblr, of course there is jvm lisps and prologs). But really which language is bigger is pointless to begin with.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
        http://abcl.org http://abcl.org
- gnulinux 8y ago
  Maybe ML hype will kill python in 20 years?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- aethertron 8y ago
  PicoLisp has a built-in Prolog engine. I haven't tried it yet. I'd like to build some project in it.
giardini 8y ago
FWIW This article has been posted/discussed 3 times over the last 8 years. A follow-up article was also posted/discussed once. To see them just search for "Who killed Prolog" using the HN search function at bottom of news.ycombinator.com.
- macintux 8y ago
  Even easier: there’s a “past” link embedded at the top of each discussion. (I just discovered this after being here for several years.)
chajath 8y ago
In my mind Prolog is enjoying a health afterlife in the form of Erlang (and Elixir)
- colanderman 8y ago
  Beside syntax, those languages are nothing like Prolog. Notably lacking are backtracking and logic variables.
  - macintux 8y ago
    True, but Erlang was originally built using Prolog, so it’s true in a historical sense even if not particularly relevant now.
xvilka 8y ago
There is some increasing interest in logic languages recently, mostly as an extension of DL/ML approach - probabilistic logic for example. Surprisingly easy probabilistic systems can be built with Prolog [1]. [1] https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/ai https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/ai
pryce 8y ago
I'm thrilled to see Prolog logic-engine concepts heavily contributing to Clojure's core.logic library[1]. Because Clojure plays so well with the JVM, having industry applications leveraging logic engines is becoming beautifully feasible. [1] https://github.com/clojure/core.logic https://github.com/clojure/core.logic
- billrobertson42 8y ago
  core.logic hasn't really seen any updates in such a long time. I don't think it's maintained any more.
  - grzm 8y ago
    Are you aware of any outstanding bugs or features that are missing? Lack of updates can sometimes mean that a library is complete (or nearly so).
    - pryce 8y ago
      Nafc 'Negation as failure constraint' is still labelled 'experimental', though I'm not familiar with the reasons behind that.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    The plague of modern software engineering is "there are no updates, it must be unmaintained". This attitude makes tons of solid, old, working software seem "outdated" and creates a cultural momentum towards new, shiny, broken shit. The result is ecosystems like js. Maybe we should believe software can be complete?
    - mark_l_watson 8y ago
      You definitely get +1 for writing the most true comment I have read today. This also happens in the Common Lisp world: there are old libraries that are very solid and useful even if they have not been modified for a while. Years ago, I thought of writing a science fiction story predicated on the idea that in the far future that the world would run on ancient software that was proved correct and made perfect by being debugged over the centuries.
sordina 8y ago
I can't remember where I heard this, but I was told that the death of logic languages occurred due to the poaching of the majority of good active researchers and developers by the big database companies.
- olliej 8y ago
  “Poaching” implies theft. Are you saying researchers belong to their university? Or are you saying once someone is a researcher they are no longer allowed to move to industry? Also in my experience a lot of researchers are grad students, who move to industry on completion of their degree - does getting a job after graduating mean you were “poached”?
  - sordina 8y ago
    Is this a serious comment? Poaching is a pretty common term for actively hiring someone, especially groups of people from another position of employment. Similar to head hunting not referring to actual collection of heads.
profalseidol 8y ago
Since I don't know Prolog (except for it being mentioned in some computer history subject in school), I search for a crash course and found this: http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&pageid=lpn-htmlse1 http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&page... Good fast tutorial for it. Side-note: The tutorial calls the condition the 'body' and the resulting facts as 'head' took me awhile to absorb since my brain can't stop thinking of the common syntax: if(conditions){body}
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  That tutorial is fast, but it's a pretty bad tutorial that will teach you terrible habits and a very incomplete understanding of Prolog. Unfortunately there are no good free ones. Many people seem to like https://www.metalevel.at/prolog https://www.metalevel.at/prolog (featured here several times). Although I don't think it's very good from a didactic point of view, many disagree, and at least the author really knows what they are talking about. I have a PDF of the fifth edition of "Programming in Prolog" by Clocksin and Mellish lying around here. I could swear it was available for free as open access for a while, though a very quick web search doesn't confirm this.
  - profalseidol 8y ago
    Thanks. Looks like a good proper learning material for Prolog. However, I just needed to get a feel or taste of what Prolog is without spending too much time reading concepts. Thanks for the book suggestion. Quick duckduck for it gives me this pdf: http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs372/spring15/ProgrammingInProlog5eC-M.pdf http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs372/spring15/Programmin...
    - tom_mellior 8y ago
      That's the one, thanks for digging it up!
Animats 8y ago
Pure Prolog can do backtracking and little else. It's a domain-specific language. Long ago I wrote something in Turbo Prolog. The algorithm, for configuring minicomputers, was easy. The drop-down menus were hell.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  As I was seeing another post, it seems like Prolog's advantage would be as an embedded DSL. So you can write the logic parts in Prolog, then switch to C++ or Java or whatever for the GUI.
  - YorkshireSeason 8y ago
    You might find the following papers interesting. [1] O. Kiselyov, K. Kameyama, Rethinking Prolog. http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/rethinking.pdf http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/rethinking.pdf [2] E. Barrett, C. F. Bolz, L. Tratt, Unipycation: A Case Study in Cross-Language Tracing. https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/barrett_bolz_tratt__unipycation_a_study_in_cross_language_tracing.pdf https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/barrett_bolz_tratt__unipycatio...
roenxi 8y ago
One of the reasons C is the way it is is that that way is the way the processor is. The abstraction isn't perfect, but it is decent enough for a first approximation. I'm guessing Fortran is similar. Imperitive languages of that era were used because they worked very closely with the actual actions of the CPU and gave a fine grained control over execution, allowing efficiencies. Since then, popular languages have all been improvements that take advantage of increased computing power to do interesting things. Sometimes new paradigms rear up - eg, Clojure with its set-and-forget approach to values. That paradigm is sold on the basis that it is easier to reason about, debug and as a practical bonus faster in many cases than the alternative. This is a great reason to learn a new paradigm. Prolog is an experiment, but has anyone found a domain for the paradigm of logic programming? I've used it, and I couldn't see any domain where it seemed to have an advantage. For AI in particular - the way the world is developing, it seems logic is a weak foundation for intelligence. At this point, given that we know humans do not use logic for their intelligence, it would be a little surprising if logic is the best way to approach that particular problem. In most domains, the error in your sensor overwhelms the existence of fact and the 'rules' are more what you'd call guidelines. If I rule out AI, what field is Prolog especially suited for? It doesn't read like it has a natural advantage in debugability (quite the reverse imo), GUIs, stream processing, efficiency, etc. With a lack of a killer domain, why not implement it as an afterthought library in C or lisp, and keep the imperative languages we have so much research in? Basically, the default state of Prolog is dead. It doesn't represent how humans want to think about programming, it doesn't represent how the computer implements programming and so if it doesn't have a domain where its paradigm is spot on perfect it isn't going to take hold. It is an interesting idea and might yet be useful, but someone will need to find a reason to justify it.
- adimitrov 8y ago
  Prolog is useful everywhere proofs are useful. Now, a proof isn't what you may think of as a proof in the general sense. One example of a proof that Prolog is good at is solving games, such as solving a particular instance of tic tac toe, or 4-in-a-row. Beyond these toy examples, you can see a good fit in any application which needs to follow a procession of rules. These rules may be in a feeding/bleeding relationship — this is essentially constraint logic programming. The problem goes: given these constraints, does this statement fulfil the constraints? How can I make the statement fit the constraints? Which is the set of statements that fit these constraints? I know of an industry application in German luxury cars, where the customer can order a car with a lot (a lot a lot) of different features, but some are mutually exclusive. If you have this particular leather seat, you can't have that particular heating unit or whatever. Now tell me if the customer selected a valid configuration, and if not, tell me what the valid configurations "next to" the desired one are. Another application are DCGs (Definite Clause Grammar), which have the expressive power of regular expressions (EDIT: see below for a correction, it appears they're at least context-sensitive.) If you've done Monadic parsing, DCGs feel kinda similar. They're super-close to Phrase Structure Grammar rules, and used to be part of my linguistics curriculum (I hear it's all ML nowadays. Pity.) Yes, Prolog fits niche domains. But if you find a domain, such as regular languages or a problem that can be solved by CLP, the elegance of logic programming can hardly be beat. It's really a joy to work with in the right domain. It's absolutely awful as a general purpose programming language, though — mostly because the debugging is so complex, it almost feels nondeterministic (it isn't, but there were many moments at 2 in the morning where I could've sworn it is.) In principle, Prolog is great for searching for solutions of a formally posed problem. Think of it as a logic search engine. If your problem can be stated in logic, and the logic problem can be evaluated in a finite time, Prolog's your friend. If not, you'll blow the stack.
tralarpa 8y ago
If you are interested in logic programming languages (like Prolog) and in functional programming languages (like Haskell), you should definitely take a look at the Curry language. For people who know Haskell, such a type definition should look very familar: data IntTree = Leaf | Branch Int IntTree IntTree The mind-bending stuff starts when you see "function" definitions like choose x y = x choose x y = y
- adimitrov 8y ago
  choose x y = x choose x y = y :-) That's mind bending if you don't know logic programming. So how can the above statement even make sense? You have to understand that a logic program will try all possible statements until it finds a match, or simply all possible statements if its job is to do an exhaustive search of the problem space. So in the choose function above, the execution algorithm (the runtime, as it were) would try to choose x first, and see if that yields a result that matches the query. It then chooses y. This may yield no, one, or many results, depending on the exact constraints of the search space. If you posed the problem as choose 'a' 'b' then the answer would be 'a' if you're content with any solution (it gives you the first it finds), or ['a','b'] if you wanted all solutions. Man, now I wanna go do some Prolog… pity there's nobody who's gonna pay me to do it, and I have to do PHP and JS.
js8 8y ago
Maybe I have the history wrong but it seems to me that researchers moved on from classical logic to lambda calculus and intuitionist Martin-Lof type theories and associated programming languages (ML, Miranda, Ocaml, Haskell, Coq). Am I wrong in thinking that Coq for example can be considered a replacement of Prolog?
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > Am I wrong in thinking that Coq for example can be considered a replacement of Prolog? I don't know if you're right or wrong about that. But Coq is about as "dead" as Prolog is. That is, it isn't used very much for real-world programming. It doesn't look like it's going to become more alive very soon, either. Even if Coq and Prolog can be considered as "in the same style/family", maybe the problem is that for most problems, most people just don't want to program that way?
  - smadge 8y ago
    I suspect that most of programming languages in common use today started out as academic exercises that weren’t used for real-world programming and that most people didn’t enjoy programming in.
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  Both Coq and Prolog have something to do with logic, but that is where the similarities end. Other than this, they are apples and oranges. Prolog is a programming language whose execution is based on certain logical principles. Coq is a functional programming language, and and extra logic layer to prove things about programs written in its programming language. If you will, Prolog uses logic at "run time", while Coq uses logic at "compile time". Different things (and very different logics).
- arnobastenhof 8y ago
  Languages like Prolog and Haskell represent different views on the relation between logic and computation. Prolog models computation as proof search, whereas Haskell models it as proof normalization. In the former case your program basically consists of a bunch of formulas that are used as assumptions in an attempt to answer a query at runtime. With Haskell, your program consists of terms, which correspond directly to proofs under the Curry-Howard isomorphism. From the type theory perspective, with functional programming languages like Haskell the programmer writes terms (proofs) of some given type (formula), whereas with logic programming it's the runtime that tries to answer whether a given type is inhabited (i.e., if a proof exists). I'm being a bit sloppy here in that I'm disregarding the differences between classical and intuitionistic logics, although the former as well have been studied in type theory via their double negation translations. I think Girard's ludics, among other goals, tried to unify these two views, although I know too little about it. Finally, note Coq, like Haskell, models computation as proof normalization, although it's design goals are very different from Haskell.
HugoDaniel 8y ago
The operators precedence killed Prolog
mark_l_watson 8y ago
Interesting read. The mention of the book “The Fifth Generation” by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck (that I read in 1983, and was totally into at the time) made me think of Kai-Fu Lee's new book "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order" that markets the idea that China will win the AI war because they have more data and entrepreneurs and established companies who go deep with developing online to offline businesses (invest heavily in supporting physical infrastructure). History is not kind the the Japanese 5th generation project. My hunch is that Kai-fu's predictions will be more accurate than Edward's and Pamela's predictions. I used to use Prolog a lot, now I just occasionally play with it. Contrasting to Lisp: until I started my current job 15 months ago (Python ML), Lisp was one of the cornerstones of my work and consulting business for 35 years.
opless 8y ago
Did you know that there was a prolog in Windows? http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft... Dr Dobbs (bad formatting) http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 Prolog mentioned above, has been preserved on archive.org, but here for posterity... https://github.com/opless/small-prolog-walnut-creek-original https://github.com/opless/small-prolog-walnut-creek-original

82 points by ihsoj 8y ago

Interesting idea that FGCS hype killed Prolog; on the Lisp side, we tend to think that AI hype killed Lisp. Also interesting that the author considers Prolog a competitor to Lisp, when (I think) most programmers don't even think of Prolog. Similarly, while we Lisp programmers think of Algol-like languages as our great competitors, I daresay the vast majority of C, Python, C++, Perl, Java, Go &c. programmers don't even think of Lisp. I think one can just run a Prolog engine in Lisp these days, which would get one the best of both worlds. But I'm not a Prolog programmer, so … perhaps I'm incorrect.

yourapostasy 8y ago
You can run Prolog inside Common Lisp: https://www.cliki.net/prolog https://www.cliki.net/prolog I don't know how good those implementations are compared to dedicated Prolog environments, though.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  And you can run Common Lisp inside prolog: https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    And you can't run a JVM in either, so now we know that Java is the best. Or maybe that this measure was pointless?
    - profalseidol 8y ago
      There's Prolog in Java via GNU Prolog for Java: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuprologjava/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuprologjava/ We can use that to run Common Lisp which can run Prolog. Lmao
      - kazagistar 8y ago
        If you reread my comment, you will notice my claim was the other way around. I was trying to point out that the encompassing argument is pointless but showing that neither lisp nor prolog can evaluate full Java code (because the reverse is certainly assumed to be possiblr, of course there is jvm lisps and prologs). But really which language is bigger is pointless to begin with.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
      http://abcl.org http://abcl.org
gnulinux 8y ago
Maybe ML hype will kill python in 20 years?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aethertron 8y ago
PicoLisp has a built-in Prolog engine. I haven't tried it yet. I'd like to build some project in it.

giardini 8y ago

FWIW This article has been posted/discussed 3 times over the last 8 years. A follow-up article was also posted/discussed once. To see them just search for "Who killed Prolog" using the HN search function at bottom of news.ycombinator.com.

macintux 8y ago
Even easier: there’s a “past” link embedded at the top of each discussion. (I just discovered this after being here for several years.)

chajath 8y ago

In my mind Prolog is enjoying a health afterlife in the form of Erlang (and Elixir)

colanderman 8y ago
Beside syntax, those languages are nothing like Prolog. Notably lacking are backtracking and logic variables.
- macintux 8y ago
  True, but Erlang was originally built using Prolog, so it’s true in a historical sense even if not particularly relevant now.

xvilka 8y ago

There is some increasing interest in logic languages recently, mostly as an extension of DL/ML approach - probabilistic logic for example. Surprisingly easy probabilistic systems can be built with Prolog [1]. [1] https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/ai https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/ai

pryce 8y ago

I'm thrilled to see Prolog logic-engine concepts heavily contributing to Clojure's core.logic library[1]. Because Clojure plays so well with the JVM, having industry applications leveraging logic engines is becoming beautifully feasible. [1] https://github.com/clojure/core.logic https://github.com/clojure/core.logic

billrobertson42 8y ago
core.logic hasn't really seen any updates in such a long time. I don't think it's maintained any more.
- grzm 8y ago
  Are you aware of any outstanding bugs or features that are missing? Lack of updates can sometimes mean that a library is complete (or nearly so).
  - pryce 8y ago
    Nafc 'Negation as failure constraint' is still labelled 'experimental', though I'm not familiar with the reasons behind that.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  The plague of modern software engineering is "there are no updates, it must be unmaintained". This attitude makes tons of solid, old, working software seem "outdated" and creates a cultural momentum towards new, shiny, broken shit. The result is ecosystems like js. Maybe we should believe software can be complete?
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    You definitely get +1 for writing the most true comment I have read today. This also happens in the Common Lisp world: there are old libraries that are very solid and useful even if they have not been modified for a while. Years ago, I thought of writing a science fiction story predicated on the idea that in the far future that the world would run on ancient software that was proved correct and made perfect by being debugged over the centuries.

sordina 8y ago

I can't remember where I heard this, but I was told that the death of logic languages occurred due to the poaching of the majority of good active researchers and developers by the big database companies.

olliej 8y ago
“Poaching” implies theft. Are you saying researchers belong to their university? Or are you saying once someone is a researcher they are no longer allowed to move to industry? Also in my experience a lot of researchers are grad students, who move to industry on completion of their degree - does getting a job after graduating mean you were “poached”?
- sordina 8y ago
  Is this a serious comment? Poaching is a pretty common term for actively hiring someone, especially groups of people from another position of employment. Similar to head hunting not referring to actual collection of heads.

profalseidol 8y ago

Since I don't know Prolog (except for it being mentioned in some computer history subject in school), I search for a crash course and found this: http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&pageid=lpn-htmlse1 http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&page... Good fast tutorial for it. Side-note: The tutorial calls the condition the 'body' and the resulting facts as 'head' took me awhile to absorb since my brain can't stop thinking of the common syntax: if(conditions){body}

tom_mellior 8y ago
That tutorial is fast, but it's a pretty bad tutorial that will teach you terrible habits and a very incomplete understanding of Prolog. Unfortunately there are no good free ones. Many people seem to like https://www.metalevel.at/prolog https://www.metalevel.at/prolog (featured here several times). Although I don't think it's very good from a didactic point of view, many disagree, and at least the author really knows what they are talking about. I have a PDF of the fifth edition of "Programming in Prolog" by Clocksin and Mellish lying around here. I could swear it was available for free as open access for a while, though a very quick web search doesn't confirm this.
- profalseidol 8y ago
  Thanks. Looks like a good proper learning material for Prolog. However, I just needed to get a feel or taste of what Prolog is without spending too much time reading concepts. Thanks for the book suggestion. Quick duckduck for it gives me this pdf: http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs372/spring15/ProgrammingInProlog5eC-M.pdf http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs372/spring15/Programmin...
  - tom_mellior 8y ago
    That's the one, thanks for digging it up!

Animats 8y ago

Pure Prolog can do backtracking and little else. It's a domain-specific language. Long ago I wrote something in Turbo Prolog. The algorithm, for configuring minicomputers, was easy. The drop-down menus were hell.

nerdponx 8y ago
As I was seeing another post, it seems like Prolog's advantage would be as an embedded DSL. So you can write the logic parts in Prolog, then switch to C++ or Java or whatever for the GUI.
- YorkshireSeason 8y ago
  You might find the following papers interesting. [1] O. Kiselyov, K. Kameyama, Rethinking Prolog. http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/rethinking.pdf http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/rethinking.pdf [2] E. Barrett, C. F. Bolz, L. Tratt, Unipycation: A Case Study in Cross-Language Tracing. https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/barrett_bolz_tratt__unipycation_a_study_in_cross_language_tracing.pdf https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/barrett_bolz_tratt__unipycatio...

roenxi 8y ago

One of the reasons C is the way it is is that that way is the way the processor is. The abstraction isn't perfect, but it is decent enough for a first approximation. I'm guessing Fortran is similar. Imperitive languages of that era were used because they worked very closely with the actual actions of the CPU and gave a fine grained control over execution, allowing efficiencies. Since then, popular languages have all been improvements that take advantage of increased computing power to do interesting things. Sometimes new paradigms rear up - eg, Clojure with its set-and-forget approach to values. That paradigm is sold on the basis that it is easier to reason about, debug and as a practical bonus faster in many cases than the alternative. This is a great reason to learn a new paradigm. Prolog is an experiment, but has anyone found a domain for the paradigm of logic programming? I've used it, and I couldn't see any domain where it seemed to have an advantage. For AI in particular - the way the world is developing, it seems logic is a weak foundation for intelligence. At this point, given that we know humans do not use logic for their intelligence, it would be a little surprising if logic is the best way to approach that particular problem. In most domains, the error in your sensor overwhelms the existence of fact and the 'rules' are more what you'd call guidelines. If I rule out AI, what field is Prolog especially suited for? It doesn't read like it has a natural advantage in debugability (quite the reverse imo), GUIs, stream processing, efficiency, etc. With a lack of a killer domain, why not implement it as an afterthought library in C or lisp, and keep the imperative languages we have so much research in? Basically, the default state of Prolog is dead. It doesn't represent how humans want to think about programming, it doesn't represent how the computer implements programming and so if it doesn't have a domain where its paradigm is spot on perfect it isn't going to take hold. It is an interesting idea and might yet be useful, but someone will need to find a reason to justify it.

adimitrov 8y ago
Prolog is useful everywhere proofs are useful. Now, a proof isn't what you may think of as a proof in the general sense. One example of a proof that Prolog is good at is solving games, such as solving a particular instance of tic tac toe, or 4-in-a-row. Beyond these toy examples, you can see a good fit in any application which needs to follow a procession of rules. These rules may be in a feeding/bleeding relationship — this is essentially constraint logic programming. The problem goes: given these constraints, does this statement fulfil the constraints? How can I make the statement fit the constraints? Which is the set of statements that fit these constraints? I know of an industry application in German luxury cars, where the customer can order a car with a lot (a lot a lot) of different features, but some are mutually exclusive. If you have this particular leather seat, you can't have that particular heating unit or whatever. Now tell me if the customer selected a valid configuration, and if not, tell me what the valid configurations "next to" the desired one are. Another application are DCGs (Definite Clause Grammar), which have the expressive power of regular expressions (EDIT: see below for a correction, it appears they're at least context-sensitive.) If you've done Monadic parsing, DCGs feel kinda similar. They're super-close to Phrase Structure Grammar rules, and used to be part of my linguistics curriculum (I hear it's all ML nowadays. Pity.) Yes, Prolog fits niche domains. But if you find a domain, such as regular languages or a problem that can be solved by CLP, the elegance of logic programming can hardly be beat. It's really a joy to work with in the right domain. It's absolutely awful as a general purpose programming language, though — mostly because the debugging is so complex, it almost feels nondeterministic (it isn't, but there were many moments at 2 in the morning where I could've sworn it is.) In principle, Prolog is great for searching for solutions of a formally posed problem. Think of it as a logic search engine. If your problem can be stated in logic, and the logic problem can be evaluated in a finite time, Prolog's your friend. If not, you'll blow the stack.

tralarpa 8y ago

If you are interested in logic programming languages (like Prolog) and in functional programming languages (like Haskell), you should definitely take a look at the Curry language. For people who know Haskell, such a type definition should look very familar: data IntTree = Leaf | Branch Int IntTree IntTree The mind-bending stuff starts when you see "function" definitions like choose x y = x choose x y = y

adimitrov 8y ago
choose x y = x choose x y = y :-) That's mind bending if you don't know logic programming. So how can the above statement even make sense? You have to understand that a logic program will try all possible statements until it finds a match, or simply all possible statements if its job is to do an exhaustive search of the problem space. So in the choose function above, the execution algorithm (the runtime, as it were) would try to choose x first, and see if that yields a result that matches the query. It then chooses y. This may yield no, one, or many results, depending on the exact constraints of the search space. If you posed the problem as choose 'a' 'b' then the answer would be 'a' if you're content with any solution (it gives you the first it finds), or ['a','b'] if you wanted all solutions. Man, now I wanna go do some Prolog… pity there's nobody who's gonna pay me to do it, and I have to do PHP and JS.

js8 8y ago

Maybe I have the history wrong but it seems to me that researchers moved on from classical logic to lambda calculus and intuitionist Martin-Lof type theories and associated programming languages (ML, Miranda, Ocaml, Haskell, Coq). Am I wrong in thinking that Coq for example can be considered a replacement of Prolog?

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> Am I wrong in thinking that Coq for example can be considered a replacement of Prolog? I don't know if you're right or wrong about that. But Coq is about as "dead" as Prolog is. That is, it isn't used very much for real-world programming. It doesn't look like it's going to become more alive very soon, either. Even if Coq and Prolog can be considered as "in the same style/family", maybe the problem is that for most problems, most people just don't want to program that way?
- smadge 8y ago
  I suspect that most of programming languages in common use today started out as academic exercises that weren’t used for real-world programming and that most people didn’t enjoy programming in.
tom_mellior 8y ago
Both Coq and Prolog have something to do with logic, but that is where the similarities end. Other than this, they are apples and oranges. Prolog is a programming language whose execution is based on certain logical principles. Coq is a functional programming language, and and extra logic layer to prove things about programs written in its programming language. If you will, Prolog uses logic at "run time", while Coq uses logic at "compile time". Different things (and very different logics).
arnobastenhof 8y ago
Languages like Prolog and Haskell represent different views on the relation between logic and computation. Prolog models computation as proof search, whereas Haskell models it as proof normalization. In the former case your program basically consists of a bunch of formulas that are used as assumptions in an attempt to answer a query at runtime. With Haskell, your program consists of terms, which correspond directly to proofs under the Curry-Howard isomorphism. From the type theory perspective, with functional programming languages like Haskell the programmer writes terms (proofs) of some given type (formula), whereas with logic programming it's the runtime that tries to answer whether a given type is inhabited (i.e., if a proof exists). I'm being a bit sloppy here in that I'm disregarding the differences between classical and intuitionistic logics, although the former as well have been studied in type theory via their double negation translations. I think Girard's ludics, among other goals, tried to unify these two views, although I know too little about it. Finally, note Coq, like Haskell, models computation as proof normalization, although it's design goals are very different from Haskell.

HugoDaniel 8y ago

The operators precedence killed Prolog

mark_l_watson 8y ago

Interesting read. The mention of the book “The Fifth Generation” by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck (that I read in 1983, and was totally into at the time) made me think of Kai-Fu Lee's new book "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order" that markets the idea that China will win the AI war because they have more data and entrepreneurs and established companies who go deep with developing online to offline businesses (invest heavily in supporting physical infrastructure). History is not kind the the Japanese 5th generation project. My hunch is that Kai-fu's predictions will be more accurate than Edward's and Pamela's predictions. I used to use Prolog a lot, now I just occasionally play with it. Contrasting to Lisp: until I started my current job 15 months ago (Python ML), Lisp was one of the cornerstones of my work and consulting business for 35 years.

opless 8y ago

Did you know that there was a prolog in Windows? http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft... Dr Dobbs (bad formatting) http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 Prolog mentioned above, has been preserved on archive.org, but here for posterity... https://github.com/opless/small-prolog-walnut-creek-original https://github.com/opless/small-prolog-walnut-creek-original