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Article assumes technology is adopted top-down, from the powers that be. While that was true at the time of mainframes, for a while now, technology is often ado
by 6ren 15y ago
Article assumes technology is adopted top-down, from the powers that be. While that was true at the time of mainframes, for a while now, technology is often adopted bottom-up, particularly in startups that are free to use the most effective tool for the job; and in non-mission critical systems within the enterprise. For example, this is often how open source was adopted.
The picture is complicated by libraries and tool-chains that can make an established language (c, java, python) a better choice by giving an enormous (e.g. x1000) boost to productivity, obscuring the intrinsic merits of the language itself. (Although, languages that facilitate library and tool use will promote creation of their ecosystems).
"Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things" would be a better explanation for why it's not popular today. It strikes me as a rather narrow and dogmatic AI technique; and one that you're better off reimplementing on demand (Greenspun-style), or using in a library.
- psykotic 15y ago> "Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things" would be a better explanation for why it's not popular today. It strikes me as a rather narrow and dogmatic AI technique; and one that you're better off reimplementing on demand (Greenspun-style), or using in a library. Particularly since confining logic programming to an embedded domain-specific language lets you keep it clean from any of pollution that was piled onto Prolog in an attempt to make it more of a general purpose language.
- philwelch 15y agoIncidentally, implementing logic programming in Scheme is the topic of an entire chapter of SICP.
- janecoder 15y ago"Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things" Except that many regard Prolog as a precursor that little used language SQL.
- justincormack 15y agoSql is slightly older than Prolog. They may have come from similar roots. And sql is used as an embedded subset not a whole systems programming language.