3 ms·
In the late 1980's, when I was at college in Sydney, we had a visit from a chap (I think from somewhere in the north of Europe) who'd previously won a tender fo
by Jedd 4y ago
In the late 1980's, when I was at college in Sydney, we had a visit from a chap (I think from somewhere in the north of Europe) who'd previously won a tender for, IIRC, a booking / tracking system for a relatively small airline, all to be written in Turbo Prolog.
I recall two key things from his presentation of his final product.
First, he claimed he'd quoted a half the cost/time of a COBOL-based, and a quarter of a C-based, competing tenders -- and that he'd met his deadlines.
Second, the UI was just beautiful - for both aesthetics and performance.
I didn't have much experience in enterprisey software at the time, but what little I had seen was archetypal terminal-style, monochrome, sluggish, far from user-friendly etc. I have some (no doubt unreliable) memories of this thing looking like a 'modern' (say Amiga) GUI app.
Another item in that large category of 'I wish they'd drop these things into the public domain once they retired it from production' as it would probably still make a great demo (though most free Prolog implementations these days wouldn't support (m)any of the pretty Turbo extensions, I'm sure).
- agumonkey 4y agoDo you think there are traces of this booking app ? even the name ?
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoIt could be the flight booking system described in Sictus Prolog's old homepage: SICStus Prolog is a workhorse in the transport and logistics industries, running systems that handle a third of all airline tickets, and helping railways to operate their trains better. “Most people probably have used SICStus Prolog without knowing it,” says Mats Carlsson, its lead developer. “One of our customers runs a flight booking system on SICStus which handles nearly a third of all airline tickets in the world.” https://web.archive.org/web/20190203010151/https://www.sics.se/projects/sicstus-prolog-leading-prolog-technology https://web.archive.org/web/20190203010151/https://www.sics.... The new homepage doesn't say anything about flight bookings and I can't find anything about it in the "Customers" page either: https://sicstus.sics.se/customers.html https://sicstus.sics.se/customers.html I have a sneaking suspicion that might mean the customer replaced Prolog with something else, possibly some kind of machine learning :P
- agumonkey 4y agoWho knows, in any case I'd really really love to see how these Prolog teams operate(d). Really curious how they approach modeling and problem solving.
- erk__ 4y agoAnother guess seperate from the sibling could be the Danish company PDC, they are also the developers of Turbo Pascal, and continue to develop it under its new name Visual Pascal. https://www.visual-prolog.com/ https://www.visual-prolog.com/ https://www.pdc.com/ https://www.pdc.com/ (edit: they were also the developers of turbo pascal but rebranded it)
- mjul 4y agoMy guess is that it was Prolog Development Center (PDC) [1] the company behind Turbo Prolog and Visual Prolog [2]. They built a nice business providing scheduling and planning software to airlines. They are still around if you want to get in touch. [1] https://www.pdc.com/ https://www.pdc.com/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Prolog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Prolog