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 w

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.