The more areas of knowledge one has some familiarity with and the more often one is able to recognize that most of the daily adversities we face are just random

The more areas of knowledge one has some familiarity with and the more often one is able to recognize that most of the daily adversities we face are just random incarnations of well known general problems (sometimes you'd better ignore the "academic" solution due to local circumstances, but not always). Many time a programmer will be faced with a problem which solution is to collect a set of facts and ask arbitrary questions against those. Unless one has had some exposure with prolog, one may not recognize this problem and may start designing a custom inferior system, either from scratch or based on unfit tech. Real life example: I worked once for a very respectable company where we had been given the project of devising a system that would assess the trustworthiness of accesses to some sensitive application based on a ever expanding set of data collected about users, their devices, locations, and so on. We wanted the rules governing access to be defined and refined with time by the security department. So I thought that would be a good fit for some prolog-like database and looked for one; and I could actually find one that checked all the boxes: usable as a library from C++, could update the dataset and the rules without interruption, compiled the queries down to machine code to withstand our gazillions of queries-per-secs, developed indoors (to counter the NIH syndrome), and instead of FALSE the lib would also return some metadata that could be used to produce a meaningful error message. A prototype was build in 2 weeks or so, involving 1.5 person, one of which had never used prolog before. Had never used it but knew about it. Otherwise, you can be certain that a very different path would have been taken: to hire a whole team of engineers to develop from scratch and for a very long time their very own capability system/data storage system/error reporting system that would have been less flexible and much slower, required restart for reconfiguration, etc. You can be certain of it because that's the path the company actually decided to follow, to the great benefit of those involved, who've all been rewarded with a promotion for such an undertaking :-)