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> A great example for this is XSB Prolog, I'm really sorry but it honestly cannot be. I was curious because Datalog/Prolog based technologies are intriguing so

> A great example for this is XSB Prolog, I'm really sorry but it honestly cannot be. I was curious because Datalog/Prolog based technologies are intriguing so I clicked on that link. https://xsb.com/xsb-prolog https://xsb.com/xsb-prolog seems to have no download but links to http://xsb.sourceforge.net/ http://xsb.sourceforge.net/ which claims version 3.8 (October 2017) is current and links to http://xsb.sourceforge.net/downloads/downloads.html http://xsb.sourceforge.net/downloads/downloads.html which does not specify a version but offers a tar.gz that contains version 3.7 from July 2016. Going back to sourceforge and heading to the SVN https://sourceforge.net/p/xsb/src/HEAD/tree/trunk/XSB/ https://sourceforge.net/p/xsb/src/HEAD/tree/trunk/XSB/ states version 3.9, November 2019 and looks pretty active commit-wise. Okay, let's do that. Checking out trunk, I see perl and C scrolling by. While I have no problem with Perl, I know quite a few developers - especially in the web context - that find it rather off-putting. I get a README that tells me to read the manual in order to install. Fair enough. Opening that ( http://xsb.sourceforge.net/manual1/manual1.pdf http://xsb.sourceforge.net/manual1/manual1.pdf ) gives me a 622 page PDF from October 2017. Chapter 2: "Make sure that after you have obtained XSB, you have uncompressed it by following the instructions found in the file README." There were no such instructions. But well, configure and make are in build, that's fine and the rest of the instructions are clear. I was confused why configure looked for mysql and make did something with Java but whatever, both worked great out of the box. Let me check the binary. I get a REPL, claiming to be version 3.8 from October 2017 and despite having 7 lines of output I have no idea how to quit out of that process, so I turn to Google which gives me http://xsb.sourceforge.net/shadow_site/manual1/node14.html http://xsb.sourceforge.net/shadow_site/manual1/node14.html Neither ctrl^c, nor ctrl^d work, and halt + return is ignored. I go ahead, kill the process and delete the directory. Alternatives to the above? That original site tells me to contact some organisation, "xsb prolog" on Google turns up ancient results. Now compare that with https://graphql.org/graphql-js/ https://graphql.org/graphql-js/ Just like many of these rather research centric languages, it does not matter how cool their tech is if that's the first experience people get. In my view experiences like the above are why they fail to gain adoption in today's world, not some technical aspect or technique. At least unlike much of the linked data and SPARQL world this thing compiled out of the box and I would have been up and running in about 10 minutes if I had any intention to continue.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
That sucks. XSB is old code and I believe it was meant mostly as a proof of concept even at the time it was written. I doubt many people use it, even in research, nowadays. I believe what triska meant about XSB is that it demonstrated the benefits of SLG resolution, by being a proof of concept like I say. So yes, XSB would be more of academic interest. If you want a modern Prolog to play around with you should try Swi-Prolog. From the conclusion of your comment I'm assuming you haven't tried it because you wouldn't have trouble "getting up and running" in 10 minutes. Or 5 or so. Seriously, Swi's maintainers (triska is a contributor) have gone out of their way to make it useable. Anyway, if you put in all this work to get XSB working I think you should definitely give Swi-Prolog a try. Sunk cost fallacy, innit. Here's the link: https://www.swi-prolog.org/Download.html https://www.swi-prolog.org/Download.html On windows, there's an installer. On Linux you can yum-install or apt-get etc an earlier version and try it out, then if you like it you can follow the Download page's links to figure out how to install a newer version (that does take a bit more work). If you're stuck with Prolog, there's a discourse group, here: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/ https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/ People there are always happy to help newcomers (and will never send you to RTFM). But be warned that learning Prolog is not easy. I help with markings and labs for Prolog courses at my university and students always have a hard time with it, until some things start to click. EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot. EDIT II: Oh, I forget. You can try Swi-Prolog on Swish (Prolog notebooks): https://swish.swi-prolog.org https://swish.swi-prolog.org So no need to install anything but keep in mind that some stuff is limited for security reasons (you can do a lot of damage with a language that lets you rewrite it on the fly).
- tastroder 7y ago
  Much appreciated, I kind of got what triska meant (didn't realize they were a contributor to that project), I just wanted to highlight that this is a real barrier for adoption of these alternative stacks. I find this interesting enough to spend more than those 10 minutes when I have time, sure. It's just that a random dev on the search for some component to solve something in their stack likely wont. Just gave the SWI implementation a try and that was honestly a much better experience and I could immediately jump on their getting started guides to get a feel. Thanks for the pointers as well, I've got a few colleagues that actively use prolog but good to see that there's an active community out there. > EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot. Whoops. Yup, I think I might have, I was under the impression that dot in the documentation was the sentence delimiter. (And btw, my bad about the Perl comment, I just realized when setting up the SWI one that they seem to share a file extension with Perl.)

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

That sucks. XSB is old code and I believe it was meant mostly as a proof of concept even at the time it was written. I doubt many people use it, even in research, nowadays. I believe what triska meant about XSB is that it demonstrated the benefits of SLG resolution, by being a proof of concept like I say. So yes, XSB would be more of academic interest. If you want a modern Prolog to play around with you should try Swi-Prolog. From the conclusion of your comment I'm assuming you haven't tried it because you wouldn't have trouble "getting up and running" in 10 minutes. Or 5 or so. Seriously, Swi's maintainers (triska is a contributor) have gone out of their way to make it useable. Anyway, if you put in all this work to get XSB working I think you should definitely give Swi-Prolog a try. Sunk cost fallacy, innit. Here's the link: https://www.swi-prolog.org/Download.html https://www.swi-prolog.org/Download.html On windows, there's an installer. On Linux you can yum-install or apt-get etc an earlier version and try it out, then if you like it you can follow the Download page's links to figure out how to install a newer version (that does take a bit more work). If you're stuck with Prolog, there's a discourse group, here: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/ https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/ People there are always happy to help newcomers (and will never send you to RTFM). But be warned that learning Prolog is not easy. I help with markings and labs for Prolog courses at my university and students always have a hard time with it, until some things start to click. EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot. EDIT II: Oh, I forget. You can try Swi-Prolog on Swish (Prolog notebooks): https://swish.swi-prolog.org https://swish.swi-prolog.org So no need to install anything but keep in mind that some stuff is limited for security reasons (you can do a lot of damage with a language that lets you rewrite it on the fly).

tastroder 7y ago
Much appreciated, I kind of got what triska meant (didn't realize they were a contributor to that project), I just wanted to highlight that this is a real barrier for adoption of these alternative stacks. I find this interesting enough to spend more than those 10 minutes when I have time, sure. It's just that a random dev on the search for some component to solve something in their stack likely wont. Just gave the SWI implementation a try and that was honestly a much better experience and I could immediately jump on their getting started guides to get a feel. Thanks for the pointers as well, I've got a few colleagues that actively use prolog but good to see that there's an active community out there. > EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot. Whoops. Yup, I think I might have, I was under the impression that dot in the documentation was the sentence delimiter. (And btw, my bad about the Perl comment, I just realized when setting up the SWI one that they seem to share a file extension with Perl.)