I would say in the open source world, SWI Prolog is still the king implementation, in regards to tooling, language features beyond ISO Prolog, and toolchains.
Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
31–40 of 289 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 paper…
You are definitely on to something here. OOP has some common roots with formal ontologies and knowledge representation (not so much the programming languages, but object oriented modeling). OO fails at this for various reasons, whereas logic is tailored for this specific purpose. Check out ErgoAI (formerly Flora-2), it's the most advanced Prolog flavor for representing and reasoning over knowledge. https://github.com…
you guys are giving me so much to read thanks <3 i'll give this a check when i have some time out of exams/work. I will surely check ErgoAI
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#33Shameless plug: you should check out my podcast The Search Space for a view of the broader landscape of Prolog and logic programming: https://thesearch.space/ I don't publish episodes often but I have a lot of good interviewees lined up :) In general, I would advice you to look beyond Prolog and explore Answer Set Programming, the Picat language, and the connections between logic programming and databases (SQL, RDF o…
I'll second the plug: it's an excellent podcast
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#34The CLP (constraint logic programming) systems available in some Prologs take it to the next level: https://us.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=clp
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#35I would say in the open source world, SWI Prolog is still the king implementation, in regards to tooling, language features beyond ISO Prolog, and toolchains. https://www.swi-prolog.org/
i've been aware of that for a while, it seems to be the state of the art at least in my university (to the point that to this day the researchers are trying to convert old prolog projects to this implementation)
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#36With compliments to your prof ;), interest in Prolog just now is recovering from a year-long focus on W3C's RDF/SPARQL. TBL surely had an itch to scratch with regards to logical knowledge representation dating back even longer than the web [1]. But Prolog has broader applicability not only in logical/knowledge graph querying, but also in solving all kinds of discrete combinatorical optimization problems. Or, as the Quantum Prolog site [2] puts it, "planning, optimization, diagnostics, and complex configuration." The site demos logistics optimization (in-browser demo) and reports initial optimization (parallelization) of Inductive Logic Programming and other ML tasks for partially auto-generating Prolog code from existing solutions.
Edit: ... and on performance vs SWI Prolog, too
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#37My professor swapped Prolog out for Rust at the last minute. I don't know whether he did us a disservice or a favor.
That is my point, i think that prolog isn't just a simple tool to solve stuff, i think that it's potential can still be explored (even if, to be fair, Rust can run on a functional paradigm setting)
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#38My professor swapped Prolog out for Rust at the last minute. I don't know whether he did us a disservice or a favor.
What a curious swap. May I ask which course he taught?
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#39Definitive reference: https://www.urbanautomaton.com/blog/2015/08/10/the-pledge-to...
I only have one thing to say to this man, “hey! Quit stealing my moves!”
Re: Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?
#40Not sure about Prolog itself but Datalog really needs to overtake SQL, it's just so much better. Related areas like constraint programming are still very relevant.
Could you explain more or point out some interesting references? I'm currently trying to understand how Datalog compares to SQL and, potentially GraphDBs
Don't have any interesting references, sorry. My reasoning is mainly one of simplicity and power. In SQL you need to think in terms of tables, inner joins, outer joins, foreign keys etc. whereas datalog you do everything with relations as in prolog.
Not only is it conceptually much simpler, it's also a "pit of success" situation as thinking in terms of relations instead of tables leads you towards normal forms by default.
Add the ability to automatically derive new facts based on rules and it just wins by a country mile. I recommend giving Soufflé a try.
I haven't worked with GraphDBs enough to comment on that.