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What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?

by caustic 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago
Is it still being used at all? I would be interested in it, too (and I don't think Erlang is very similar to it at all???).
- kragen 18y ago
  Erlang gets a lot of its syntax and implementation technology from Prolog, but it's true that the distinctive things about Erlang (massive shared-nothing concurrency, supervision trees, tuples, pattern-matching on binaries) have nothing in common with the distinctive things about Prolog (backtracking). They both have pattern-matching, but so do lots of other languages (even Python to a small extent). I'm pretty sure Prolog is still being used, but it doesn't have the buzz of, say, Fortran or COBOL or Pascal.
  - tlrobinson 18y ago
    Wasn't Erlang originally implemented in Prolog?
    - kragen 18y ago
      Yes.
h3rald 18y ago
...Erlang is bad enough :P
- joe_the_user 18y ago
  In the quick looks I've made at each language, I found Prolog much easier to understand than Erlang. Prolog's pure logic syntax is simple if you already know 1st order expressions. Erlang borrows some syntax from Prolog but doesn't have Prolog's simplicity.
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    Erlang has its roots in prolog (was originally built on top of prolog, actually..) Software Engineering Radio's episode 89 is a great listen for anyone interested in Erlang
alan-crowe 18y ago
Have you tried programming in Prolog? The automatic backtracking search is cool when it is exactly what you want, but most of the time it isn't. So you end up working to keep it on the leash least it give you exponential run times when you were not expecting it. I ended up concieving my algorithms without thinking about Prolog's backtracking, and then coding: bending the Prolog interpreter to my will by getting the backtracking to implement the control flow called for by my algorithm. It seemed a bit indirect and a bit clumsy. My attempts at writing a parser in Prolog were absurdly slow. Later I read that there are ways of writing parsers in Prolog that work well, and writing parsers was one of the killer apps for Prolog, so I guess I never really understood programming in Prolog properly. On the other hand it is troubling that I failed at one of the things the language is supposed to make easy. I'm in no hurry to give it a second look.

What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?

by caustic 18y ago

What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?

Tichy 18y ago

Is it still being used at all? I would be interested in it, too (and I don't think Erlang is very similar to it at all???).

kragen 18y ago
Erlang gets a lot of its syntax and implementation technology from Prolog, but it's true that the distinctive things about Erlang (massive shared-nothing concurrency, supervision trees, tuples, pattern-matching on binaries) have nothing in common with the distinctive things about Prolog (backtracking). They both have pattern-matching, but so do lots of other languages (even Python to a small extent). I'm pretty sure Prolog is still being used, but it doesn't have the buzz of, say, Fortran or COBOL or Pascal.
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  Wasn't Erlang originally implemented in Prolog?
  - kragen 18y ago
    Yes.

h3rald 18y ago

...Erlang is bad enough :P

joe_the_user 18y ago
In the quick looks I've made at each language, I found Prolog much easier to understand than Erlang. Prolog's pure logic syntax is simple if you already know 1st order expressions. Erlang borrows some syntax from Prolog but doesn't have Prolog's simplicity.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  Erlang has its roots in prolog (was originally built on top of prolog, actually..) Software Engineering Radio's episode 89 is a great listen for anyone interested in Erlang

alan-crowe 18y ago

Have you tried programming in Prolog? The automatic backtracking search is cool when it is exactly what you want, but most of the time it isn't. So you end up working to keep it on the leash least it give you exponential run times when you were not expecting it. I ended up concieving my algorithms without thinking about Prolog's backtracking, and then coding: bending the Prolog interpreter to my will by getting the backtracking to implement the control flow called for by my algorithm. It seemed a bit indirect and a bit clumsy. My attempts at writing a parser in Prolog were absurdly slow. Later I read that there are ways of writing parsers in Prolog that work well, and writing parsers was one of the killer apps for Prolog, so I guess I never really understood programming in Prolog properly. On the other hand it is troubling that I failed at one of the things the language is supposed to make easy. I'm in no hurry to give it a second look.