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Perhaps Prolog isn't very relevant to the sort of problems Paul Graham works on? Much of Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ is ab

Perhaps Prolog isn't very relevant to the sort of problems Paul Graham works on? Much of Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ is about Prolog (and logic programming in general); he ultimately implements a Prolog engine in Common Lisp, because it's a more appropriate tool for the sort of problems he's dissecting. I only know the basics of Prolog from PAIP and CTM (one of many things I hope to get into deeper over the summer...), but it seems like it would be incredibly useful, albeit within a very specific niche. I wouldn't try to write an OS in make, but that doesn't mean it isn't handy sometimes.

philwelch 17y ago
Undoubtedly there's a category of "languages" that, despite their power, are only really useful for a specific application (make, yacc, SQL, PostScript) distinct from more general purpose languages. Perl used to be in the camp of specialized languages (need to munge some text?) but now it's squarely a general purpose language. I've always seen Prolog billed as a general purpose language. If it's intended as a special purpose language, then it doesn't even make sense to criticize it compared to Lisp or C.