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So, PROLOG people, how excited should anyone be about this? This vs SWI, Visual Prolog, Prolog in a LISP like Allegro, or alternatives like Mercury. Is this significant in general or just for their community of users?
I'd like to revisit prolog, I think it is an underused language in industry.
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I hate to pick nits too much, but I kinda dislike when people use this kind of phrasing. "Open source" and "commercial" are not antonyms. Something can be both open source and commercial at the same time. RHEL is a good example. I mean, I get the point they're trying to make (I think) but I wish people would be a little more precise when talking about this topic.
I agree. I posted an essay on Schneier's blog countering the false dilemma between open source and proprietary. I'm modifying next version to say "shared source" as "open source" has specific meanings. Yet, many needs can be met with shared-source, proprietary software that are thought to be OSS-only. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...
So, PROLOG people, how excited should anyone be about this? This vs SWI, Visual Prolog, Prolog in a LISP like Allegro, or alternatives like Mercury. Is this significant in general or just for their community of users?
If SICStus went open source or free for academic use, I would probably use that in my research/courses over SWI Prolog. Mostly because of familiarity, performance, and compatibility reasons.
So, PROLOG people, how excited should anyone be about this? This vs SWI, Visual Prolog, Prolog in a LISP like Allegro, or alternatives like Mercury. Is this significant in general or just for their community of users?
Frankly, SWI gets all the action. There are times where it isn't the most efficient Prolog, but the toolset you're going to get from AMZI is much more limited, and that in the end is going to be a bigger deal. Does AMZI have ODBC, CLP, CHR, and a web framework? Probably not. SWI has the biggest community, the largest built-in library, the most 3rd-party packages, and is the easiest to install. Everything else is basically tied for second place. Except Visual Prolog, which comes last. :)
It's kind of a shame, because my earliest exposure to Prolog was through AMZI; they had a nice Windows IDE you could try for free (30 minutes at a whack). I went through their "Nani Quest" tutorial and that gave me positive memories of Prolog that I revisited later.
Mercury is an interesting language, but not having a REPL is a huge problem for me. The language mixes in some good ideas from Haskell and Clean. The tutorial comes off as sort of condescending towards Prolog users and fans though. Having to furnish modes and effect types is a bit of a burden.
Allegro is a pretty compelling product, but when I want to do Prolog, I want to do Prolog. core.logic in Clojure seems like it would be more interesting to me, because Clojure is enough better than Common Lisp. I believe core.logic is based on miniKanren, which is also interesting.
The Prolog implementations I sometimes wish I knew more about are B-Prolog, YAP and XSB. But I don't really have the kinds of performance problems that would benefit from tabling or a more sophisticated compiler.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I posted an essay on Schneier's blog countering the false dilemma between open source and proprietary. I'm modifying next version to say "shared source" as "open source" has specific meanings. Yet, many needs can be met with shared-source, proprietary software that are thought to be OSS-only. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...
Proprietary and free software are a dichotomy. It's commercial and free software that's a false dichotomy. It doesn't matter if you can "see the source" if you don't have the four freedoms when using the software.
So, "free as in Stallman" software might be a dichotomy with proprietary but not "free as in free enough for many people." That exists and can flourish further with right mix of organizations, charters, licenses and so on. Just little work in it.
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Proprietary and free software are a dichotomy. It's commercial and free software that's a false dichotomy. It doesn't matter if you can "see the source" if you don't have the four freedoms when using the software.
You can have all of the key freedoms with the restriction that they're paid for. This continues development, maintenance, and support. I'm not speculating as there's software with source available developed through commercial licensing. So, "free as in Stallman" software might be a dichotomy with proprietary but not "free as in free enough for many people." That exists and can flourish further with right mix of organ…
None of the four essential freedoms mention price. I work for a free software company which sells that software. I don't know what you're referring to. I clearly said that "free and commercial software are a FALSE dichotomy" -- meaning that you can have commercial free software.
> So, "free as in Stallman" software might be a dichotomy with proprietary but not "free as in free enough for many people."
Again "free as in Stallman" doesn't have anything to do with whether you pay for the software (in fact, he used to sell copies of GNU Emacs for $100). Proprietary software is software that takes away your freedom to use, modify and distribute the software. You can pay for free software and you can pay for proprietary software. But you can't get proprietary software that respects your freedom. That is a dichotomy.
Free doesn't refer to price it refers to freedom. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have all of the key freedoms with the restriction that they're paid for. This continues development, maintenance, and support. I'm not speculating as there's software with source available developed through commercial licensing. So, "free as in Stallman" software might be a dichotomy with proprietary but not "free as in free enough for many people." That exists and can flourish further with right mix of organ…
> You can have all of the key freedoms with the restriction that they're paid for. None of the four essential freedoms mention price. I work for a free software company which sells that software. I don't know what you're referring to. I clearly said that "free and commercial software are a FALSE dichotomy" -- meaning that you can have commercial free software. > So, "free as in Stallman" software might be a dichotomy…
So, PROLOG people, how excited should anyone be about this? This vs SWI, Visual Prolog, Prolog in a LISP like Allegro, or alternatives like Mercury. Is this significant in general or just for their community of users?
Also, having more open-source Prolog engines is a very good thing, both for the language and for the project itself. For the project, it's good because it makes it easier for a community to grow around it. Swi has benefited enormously from its popularity (Jan Wielemaker has commented on this occasionally). For the language, it's good because the more healthy Prolog communities we have, the more we can hope to get new people interested in the language.
Comparing to other Prologs (and Prologs-ish'es) the problem with having closed-source and only for-pay Prolog engines is mainly one of portability, which in the Prolog world is a bit shit (and that's a vast understatement).
Frex, I wrote my degree dissertation using Win-LPA Prolog in 2010-11. LPA is commercial and I don't have a licence anymore (I had a student one) so now I can't run my dissertation. I tried (and tried (and tried)) to make it work on Swi but failed (and failed (and failed))[1].
The problem is there are subtle differences between implementations that bite you in ways you never thought possible, and it's just aaaargh hard to get the same program running in the same way on two different Prologs.
Apparently the exception to this portability hell is Yap and Swi, who have worked together to maintain some compatibility with each other. I don't have experience of this myself (after getting burned I've stuck to Swi) but if Amzi open-sourcing their stuff also means they'll be more open to this sort of working with others, then that's really, really amazing news.
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[1] It's here: https://github.com/stassa/Gleemin But it will hurt you.
Also, graduate dissertation, 5 years ago: embarrassing.
So, PROLOG people, how excited should anyone be about this? This vs SWI, Visual Prolog, Prolog in a LISP like Allegro, or alternatives like Mercury. Is this significant in general or just for their community of users?
Not an expert, but certainly an amateur "Prolog person." Frankly, SWI gets all the action. There are times where it isn't the most efficient Prolog, but the toolset you're going to get from AMZI is much more limited, and that in the end is going to be a bigger deal. Does AMZI have ODBC, CLP, CHR, and a web framework? Probably not. SWI has the biggest community, the largest built-in library, the most 3rd-party package…
Yeah, that's a great tutorial to the language, I learned a buttload from that when I was doing my degree. Not to look down on Learn Prolog Now! and others, but this is how to teach Prolog to university students.