3 ms·

Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built my

Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit. Sure there are now some shinier toys in the Prolog box but the problems with Prolog seem to be the same now as they were 35+ years ago - it's seen as a niche CS-only tool, where to get any traction at all you have to absorb reams of terminology that's mostly unknown outside of academia, or has been forgotten post-graduation - Prolog really doesn't do itself any favours, and never has. I think expecting academia to ever "sell" Prolog is a bust - if it hasn't happened by now, it never will. Better to directly target people earning their crust writing code, and sell the benefits to them, with real examples, not Towers of Hanoi and N-Queens. And as far as practicable, try to relate them to things that they are more likely to already know, such as SQL or Functional programming?

JadeNB 1y ago
> Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit. If you care for recommendations to complement those two, O'Keefe's The craft of Prolog is my favorite Prolog book.
- crustycoder 1y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation :-)
thesz 1y ago
https://github.com/stassa/louise https://github.com/stassa/louise "Louise is a machine learning system that learns Prolog programs." For example, it can infer context-free grammar from half a dozen examples, one positive and several negatives.
jrapdx3 1y ago
Back in the ancient 80s Prolog made a splash for a time. There was Turbo Prolog (Borland) that I used for a couple of years, wrote some useful programs with it. I also have "The Art of Prolog" and pull it out once in a while. My Prolog skills seem subject to rapid decay with disuse. While the appeal of declarative programming is still there, the most that can be said is Prolog's influence is evident in subsequent languages. The incorporation of pattern matching is one example that comes to mind.
superdisk 1y ago
From experience I've found that Prolog excels at anything to do with parsing. The one thing I miss in every other language is DCGs especially, and any time I need to write a personal script that reads and writes some file format, I always use Prolog because then I can just write the code once and get both modalities for free :) When I finally get around to making my own perfect language I'll have to figure out how to crowbar backtracking and DCGs in somehow.

JadeNB 1y ago

> Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit. If you care for recommendations to complement those two, O'Keefe's The craft of Prolog is my favorite Prolog book.

crustycoder 1y ago
Thanks for the recommendation :-)

thesz 1y ago

https://github.com/stassa/louise https://github.com/stassa/louise "Louise is a machine learning system that learns Prolog programs." For example, it can infer context-free grammar from half a dozen examples, one positive and several negatives.

jrapdx3 1y ago

Back in the ancient 80s Prolog made a splash for a time. There was Turbo Prolog (Borland) that I used for a couple of years, wrote some useful programs with it. I also have "The Art of Prolog" and pull it out once in a while. My Prolog skills seem subject to rapid decay with disuse. While the appeal of declarative programming is still there, the most that can be said is Prolog's influence is evident in subsequent languages. The incorporation of pattern matching is one example that comes to mind.

superdisk 1y ago

From experience I've found that Prolog excels at anything to do with parsing. The one thing I miss in every other language is DCGs especially, and any time I need to write a personal script that reads and writes some file format, I always use Prolog because then I can just write the code once and get both modalities for free :) When I finally get around to making my own perfect language I'll have to figure out how to crowbar backtracking and DCGs in somehow.