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Have you ever seem a simple Prolog program solving the 'four coloring problem'? Try programming that in anything else. Prolog or something similar like Lisp w

• kkoch986 13y ago
  I think prolog gets a bad rap because people don't spend the time to learn how it really works and how awesome it really is. More than matching which you can get in most functional languages, non-determinism from prolog makes solving all kinds of problems (four coloring included) elegant and simple. If prolog had more of a community behind it, I think it would move up that list pretty quickly.
• dmunoz 13y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this line of reasoning. The computation model of Prolog is fairly simple, relies on few primitive, and could be reimplemented in many language without much hassle. The abstract interpreter fits on a 1/4 page. With unification and backtracking, you're into nondeterministic programming. It's great for some problem, and I agree it should perhaps be more regarded than it is, but it can be emulated inside other languages to solve such problems. You also have to be quite careful when using non-determinism. That being said, my main point is that I think the "simple Prolog program solving" X is misleading. Of course a solution to a problem that requires exactly the model of computation the language provides is going to be simple in that language. But that model of computation isn't exclusive to that language, and I don't feel the implementation of the model in other languages suffer.