One of the things Prolog taught me was the importance of teachers who can put themselves in the shoes of the student. At university we were largely taught Prol

One of the things Prolog taught me was the importance of teachers who can put themselves in the shoes of the student. At university we were largely taught Prolog by mathematicians who exclusively worked in such languages. Prolog was a very natural way of thinking for them, and many of them had never really used other non-logic/functional languages. For most of the students, who had worked mostly with procedural languages before, it was confusing and frustrating, we would all get tied up trying to use Prolog as if it were some other language. It wasn't until my third or fourth course that used Prolog, and having studied the algorithm behind it, that I really got my head around how to use it well. Later on I was helping an undergrad I knew was having problems with Prolog. It was mostly about how to change the way he thought about solving problems to fit in the Prolog world, rather than trying to make Prolog behave like all the other languages he'd used (he was a great developer in everything except Prolog). After quite a bit of discussion there was a real epiphany and he suddenly got it and he proceeded to nail the coursework.