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Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

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Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#1

Post by overclock351 »

Hi, i am a compsci student that stumbled upon prolog and logic programming during my studies.

While i have seen the basics of vanilla prolog (atoms, predicates, cuts, lists and all that jazz) and a godawful implementation of an agent communication system that works on SICStus prolog. I would like to know more because i think that this language might be a powerhouse in per se.

Since my studies are quite basic in this regards i would like to expand my knowledge on it and kind of specialize myself both in this world and another world (ontologies :D) that i really enjoy.

What's prolog like in 2024? what are you wonderful people doing with it?

thanks from a dumbass :D

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#2

Post by DamonHD »

Not quite what you asked for, but as someone using it quite a lot back in the late '80s during a CS&AI degree, Prolog has its interesting features and I'm glad I used it, but I haven't missed it since. I do like declarative stuff, eg CSS!, and that remains a good memory.

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#3

Post by overclock351 »

DamonHD wrote: post #2

Not quite what you asked for, but as someone using it quite a lot back in the late '80s during a CS&AI degree, Prolog has its interesting features and I'm glad I used it, but I haven't missed it since. I do like declarative stuff, eg CSS!, and that remains a good memory.

could you please expand on it? i would love to read more

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#5

Post by hendler »

Prolog itself is still developed and used in various settings (mostly swi-prolog?), but other languages and logic engines solve domain specific but similar problems better (rule engines, formal proof verifiers, etc). For exploratory work it can be useful.

I have tried to use it in combination will LLMs unsuccessfully, partly because the domain was not specific enough. Otherwise you need a lot of real world knowledge and a large fact database.

Logic engines for first order logic in RDF/OWL also have interesting logical inference abilities, like graphdbs.

Any programming language can do "logic" and the work at MIT/CSAIL in probabilistic programming may turn out to be a better way to combine fuzzy logic and formal proofs.

Not sure this answers your question, but maybe this points towards some interesting directions.

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#6

Post by overclock351 »

tomstuart wrote: post #4

Definitive reference: https://www.urbanautomaton.com/blog/2015/08/10/the-pledge-to...

Looks fun :D, i think that if i ask my manager to build something out of Prolog i would probably get stab... i mean fired since most of us work in OOP. I would love to be that insane one asking for that :D.

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#7

Post by xavxav »

There is still academic work on Prolog, and more broadly deductive / logic programming. If you are looking at things with a more industrial bent, I would look to Datalog which trades generality in Prolog for performance and predictability. Alternatively, you can go the other way and look at lambdaProlog which adds real abstractions / HOFs to Prolog.

What I've seen in practice is that while Prolog may be good at describing a solution, its performance is often too lackluster and brittle for actual deployment: it probably fits more as a prototyping language before you do a classic implementation of the solution in a more traditional language.

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#8

Post by DamonHD »

overclock351 wrote: post #3
DamonHD wrote: post #2

Not quite what you asked for, but as someone using it quite a lot back in the late '80s during a CS&AI degree, Prolog has its interesting features and I'm glad I used it, but I haven't missed it since. I do like declarative stuff, eg CSS!, and that remains a good memory.

could you please expand on it? i would love to read more

Many many languages that you will encounter and use in live projects are primarily imperative, eg: C, C++, JavaScript. The describe the "how" and "in what order".

While I was an undergrad I was exposed to Standard ML and Prolog, both of which were/are much more about declarative "what", though they could only practically interact with the actual world by side-effects and some imposed ordering (SML's 'ref', Prolog's cut).

I am still waiting for some of the amazing stuff that was in SML to materialise in C++ and Java for example, less so anything from Prolog. For example, to search a state space I might use an off-the-shelf solver with good heuristics and an objective function written in something imperative rather than use Prolog.

But it it really is over 30Y since I touched Prolog, so life in it may be very different now.

Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

#10

Post by overclock351 »

hendler wrote: post #5

Prolog itself is still developed and used in various settings (mostly swi-prolog?), but other languages and logic engines solve domain specific but similar problems better (rule engines, formal proof verifiers, etc). For exploratory work it can be useful. I have tried to use it in combination will LLMs unsuccessfully, partly because the domain was not specific enough. Otherwise you need a lot of real world knowledge…

Any answer here is a good one since the question is soooo unspecific :D. My professor is a staunch advocate for RDF/OWL, inference engines and stuff like that (hence why i also mentioned ontologies :D).

The thing is that i think that the language itself has so much untapped potential and the world that i dived into with my studies is so vast, so full of stuff that it left me kind of dazed to be fair!

I got some papers in regards to knowledge representation (that to be fair i still have to read... exams and work got in the midst of all :/) but still it seems so... odd: when we were studying OOP in my bachelor we went over the usual examples that made you understand "this is not an imperative paradigm but there are object abstractions" while, in my studies, prolog and logic programming in general was seen as a tool of sorts for reaching an objective like "hey we have a MAS system, let's sprinkle some prolog in it for fun :D" (maybe i am exaggerating but it feels like this lol). I feel it can do much much more

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