If you want to make/prototype any sort of complex text manipulation (parser, interpreter, compiler, etc.) or have a desire to make purely functional list processing programs, Prolog is by far the best in terms of flexibility and ease of use. DCGs are miles ahead of everything else in this area, and this is not surprising since that was exactly the expected use case when Prolog was designed.
Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
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Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#62How do you guys think about the opportunity cost of learning dead/dying/new/unpopular languages? Even with newer languages that are gaining popularity and are likely to be used in the future, I struggle to justify the time investment. I could be wrong but some of my concerns are: - my time is better spent getting deeper into some more popular language that I already know to some extent - unused skills deteriorate wit…
In my experience, having a variety of programming languages on your resume is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it often impresses or makes you more desirable in the eyes of the programmers who do your initial phone screen or whiteboard interview. They like seeing that you're curious and passionate about the field.
If you explore languages that they haven't explored yet, then they might be excited about the chance to learn something from you. If you've explored the same trendy language they're already exploring, then their ego might feel validated by seeing others on the same bandwagon.
Either way, they're probably frustrated by various examples of not having buy-in from management or architects to do various things they'd like with the existing codebase. So they might see you as the right kind of mindset, someone hungry who will be an ally in pushing for improvements.
On the OTHER hand, it will often worry managers and architects. Who have enough stress on their plates dealing with the business stakeholders, and don't want to hire another kid who will throw a temper tantrum when they're not allowed to re-write the entire platform in Rust.
So if you DO decide to put various "personal interest" languages on your resume, then make it a point during phone or F2F interviews to highlight your professional maturity. How you understand the need to balance risk. In other words, that you explore languages on your personal time to make you a better developer, not because you really have an expectation of using Brainfuck on your employer's projects.
Even with that said, by the time you're 5+ years in the industry, I'd be a little wary of putting too much on your resume that isn't genuine professional experience. I include Lisp and F# on my resume just for the occasional conversation-starter... but if I really had a list of 12 hobby languages, then I would probably try to mention that in the interview, rather than listing them all on my printed resume/CV.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#63I wonder... is it still justified to learn Prolog now? Aren't there better alternatives for logic programming in many other common programming languages? I mean http://minikanren.org/
I've spent time trying to wrap my head around ideas in minikanren and move them out of scheme. But while reading and playing with minikanren has been quite illuminating, it has yet to help me solve many "real" naturally occurring problems. And indeed, some of the motivations for minkanren are aesthetic or philosophical stances, rather than pragmatic (wanting to avoid having to use the cut operator etc). Most of the work around minikanren seems more aimed at piloting approaches or techniques which could be used to produce useful tools, rather than actually producing useful tools.
But perhaps someone who has used languages in this area more broadly than I can comment: Which is a better bang for your buck? - Prolog - "Functional logic languages" e.g. Curry, Mercury - Clojure + core.logic - scheme + minikanren
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#64I used Datalog a good deal in grad school (CS). It was frustrating at first, but once I figured it out, I liked it a lot. If you've never tried a declarative programming language, you should give Datalog a try.
+1 to Datalog -- it is fantastic for static analysis in particular! There are a bunch of papers from Yannis Smaragdakis' group on this; I built my thesis work on top of their system Doop [1] which is a whole-program points-to analysis written completely in Datalog.
In general it's very nice to be able to prototype queries/inference rules quickly and then tweak clause ordering, etc for performance later if needed.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#65How do you guys think about the opportunity cost of learning dead/dying/new/unpopular languages? Even with newer languages that are gaining popularity and are likely to be used in the future, I struggle to justify the time investment. I could be wrong but some of my concerns are: - my time is better spent getting deeper into some more popular language that I already know to some extent - unused skills deteriorate wit…
Learning another language with basically the exact same mental model behind them is not as worthy to spend time on. But learning a language with an entirely different paradigm is really eye opener and will make you a better programmer even if you’ll never write a line of code in it. For example, learning Haskell is a really good way to learn about FP and then you can easily apply it in a not strictly FP language. Pro…
I agree.
For me it also came with a huge down side. I spent the last six to seven years using Scala, learning FP concepts, getting familiar with Haskell and it's concepts as well as other functional languages. This is after 7+ years prior doing lots of typical Java, Javascript, PHP which I was quite happy to use.
Now I'm in the situation after learning languages which provide far more useful day to day principals, abstractions and safety I struggle or rather get frustrated very quickly when I go back to C style languages i.e Java, Javascript, PHP, Python.
My huge problem now is I'm in Sydney, Australia. 4-5 years ago there was a reasonable strong enthusiasm for Scala and functional programmers in general. No, I've been looking to change jobs for the past year and absolutely nothing has popped up.
It seems the only roles available are traditional Java with Spring Boot, Javscript, Python and C#.
Even with DevOps stuff which I have a bunch of experience for everyone want Ansible when after discovering NixOS/Nix it completely removes the need for Ansible giving declarative deterministic infrastructure/deployments without fragile line upon line of YAML files.
Of course all the functional programming work I've learnt is usable and can be applied everyday in other languages. Functional programming isn't new predating all the new shiny popular languages. The problem is having used better languages which treat these principals as first class it isn't the same as trying to hack together something in a language never designed to support it.
It seems I've now learnt myself out of a job. If I want a job I need to take a step backwards and use tools that now frustrate me and seem clunky / broken. It's at the point where I'm starting to look at a career change outside of software to start enjoying work again.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#66How do you guys think about the opportunity cost of learning dead/dying/new/unpopular languages? Even with newer languages that are gaining popularity and are likely to be used in the future, I struggle to justify the time investment. I could be wrong but some of my concerns are: - my time is better spent getting deeper into some more popular language that I already know to some extent - unused skills deteriorate wit…
Learning Prolog is less about learning the particulars of the language than about learning the logic programming paradigm, which is timeless and universal.
"You can write FORTRANProlog in any language."
When I first started at Google, the 1440 Broadway office in Times Square was pretty crowded and they stuck me in where there was a desk, and I ended up sitting next to a guy (let's call him MelJeremy, because that's his name) who did "1% experiment" analysis. One day, I asked Jeremy what he was working on, and he said he was writing some Prolog to check some hypothesis, and he invited me over to have a look.
Really, he was writing a complex rule matching engine (behind the scenes lazily constructing a DFA that operated over experiment observations instead of characters) in Python, to be able to sort sets of observations and contexts into those that fit a hypothesis and those that didn't, as part of some Bayesian inference.
But, it was easiest to think of the experiments observations as a facts database and his complex hypotheses and complex contexts as Prolog rules. So, in this case, Prolog was a mental tool, not a programming tool, and he ended up implementing a tiny tiny subset of a Prolog engine that used Python object constructors instead of Prolog syntax.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#67How do you guys think about the opportunity cost of learning dead/dying/new/unpopular languages? Even with newer languages that are gaining popularity and are likely to be used in the future, I struggle to justify the time investment. I could be wrong but some of my concerns are: - my time is better spent getting deeper into some more popular language that I already know to some extent - unused skills deteriorate wit…
Prolog isn't dead, it's just resting. Actually, people find practical uses for it still though it tends to be domain specific. Look at the alternatives. If there's a practical alternative to the language/material that has reasonably widespread use and can be counted on to be present in 5-20 years, go for the alternative. If you have a need for something that's been put through its paces for 40 years and is battle tes…
There are a great many languages that are often called “dead” that see rather active use in very specific domains that are called dead for not being general purpose.
By the standards of “dead” frequently employed to point out that, say, Hasell is dead, R, Wolfram Language, and Fortran would be considered “dead” as well.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#68I used prolog in anger when I first started at a startup some years ago (why that was is another story) and while I found it interesting, it was really quite an ineffective experience for me. Firstly, by being so declarative if was very easy to end up with O(a^n) algorithms by mistake and secondly I found, at least in what I was doing, that for example the ordering of declarations would change program behaviour which…
I had the same problem when trying out Haskell:
they give abstractions that are not constant multipliers in terms of speed or memory usage compared to a low level solution (like garbage collection and dynamic typing).
Rust gives just the opposite type of abstraction over C++: memory safety without adding any unpredictability in execution (and of course updates in the language design).
While relational algebra (SQL) is equivalent to logic algebra, it's easier to reason how it executes.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning another language with basically the exact same mental model behind them is not as worthy to spend time on. But learning a language with an entirely different paradigm is really eye opener and will make you a better programmer even if you’ll never write a line of code in it. For example, learning Haskell is a really good way to learn about FP and then you can easily apply it in a not strictly FP language. Pro…
I agree. For me it also came with a huge down side. I spent the last six to seven years using Scala, learning FP concepts, getting familiar with Haskell and it's concepts as well as other functional languages. This is after 7+ years prior doing lots of typical Java, Javascript, PHP which I was quite happy to use. Now I'm in the situation after learning languages which provide far more useful day to day principals, ab…
> 4-5 years ago there was a reasonable strong enthusiasm for Scala and functional programmers in general. No, I've been looking to change jobs for the past year and absolutely nothing has popped up.
I think businesses have weighted the power/capability of scala against the relative lack of easily hireable programmer for them.
If a business makes themself dependent on one (or a few) key scala programmers, they are more prone to be held hostage (e.g., the power dynamic is more towards the scala programmer). They will have to pay more salary or face the risk of the programmer leaving (which affects business continuity). The scala stack doesn't automatically give a more competitive edge against the competition, however (tho i would say it does, but only if the entire org buys into it).
Therefore, it makes more business sense, esp. for a middle manager responsible for hiring, to hire a java programmer (which is basically a dime a dozen at this point). The business will face no risk of the programmer holding the business hostage (because they are easily replaceable). So that's why you see businesses start to not adopt scala.
Re: Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
#70Prolog is great and kind of weird in a good way. One other benefit is that you can pick up erlang really quickly if you know prolog. Erlang was first prototyped in prolog and that prototype’s host language heavily influenced erlang’s syntax. Why learn erlang? Check out the high scalability of WhatsApp.