3 ms·
Why Prolog Is Not as Popular as SQL in Imperative Programming?
- PaulHoule 12y agoI think the Stack Exchangers miss the point. I don't think the predicate syntax is a big problem, but there are two real problems with Prolog. The first is that it is awkward to mix declarative and procedural programming in Prolog. For instance, in Prolog sometimes you trigger a logical failure when an event succeeds to get the control flow the way you want, and this drives you up the wall. The other one is historical. Early on there was hope that Prolog could be executed in parallel. It was discovered around 1982 that it can't be. The Fifth Generation Computer project developed Prolog-like languages, such as KL0, that can parallelize, but these languages were less palatable to work in than actual Prolog. I think the production rule systems that were popular in the 1970's and 1980's are less popular than they ought to be, but the rapid progress of Drools could be changing that.