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I have a long standing love affair with Prolog and frustration for its failure to grow. Prolog has poor features for abstraction and is actually not declarative enough! Prolog's limitations can be great for starting to get the paradigm but then you hit a wall. (Kind of like standard Pascal!) Mercury and Curry fix some of these limitations as does miniKanren. Integrating CLP is important yet so far always clumsy as st…
You would ask reasonable questions like, "for God's sake, why?". It feels like you wouldn't use Prolog for anything besides an intellectual game.
Regarding the why:
Some of those reasons include Definite Clause Grammars, Meta-Interpreters, 1st class constraint logic programming, reified conditionals, and term/goal expansion.
There are a lot of exciting modern advances with Prolog, especially Scryer Prolog.
Check out Power of Prolog and get your mind blown: https://youtube.com/@thepowerofprolog
I have a long standing love affair with Prolog and frustration for its failure to grow. Prolog has poor features for abstraction and is actually not declarative enough! Prolog's limitations can be great for starting to get the paradigm but then you hit a wall. (Kind of like standard Pascal!) Mercury and Curry fix some of these limitations as does miniKanren. Integrating CLP is important yet so far always clumsy as st…
Also not sure what you mean, CLP is a first class consideration in many Prologs, esp Scryer Prolog. Check these crazy demos out:
[1] https://youtu.be/h5Xy4YjCZxM
[2] https://youtu.be/5KUdEZTu06o
Just look at this Sudoku solver code (see [2] for explanation):
sudoku(Rows) :-
length(Rows, 9),
maplist(same_length(Rows), Rows),
append(Rows, Vs), Vs ins 1..9,
maplist(all_distinct, Rows),
transpose(Rows, Columns),
maplist(all_distinct, Columns),
Rows = [As,Bs,Cs,Ds,Es,Fs,Gs,Hs,Is],
blocks(As, Bs, Cs),
blocks(Ds, Es, Fs),
blocks(Gs, Hs, Is).
blocks([], [], []).
blocks([N1,N2,N3|Ns1], [N4,N5,N6|Ns2], [N7,N8,N9|Ns3]) :-
all_distinct([N1,N2,N3,N4,N5,N6,N7,N8,N9]),
blocks(Ns1, Ns2, Ns3).
[3]: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2347#disc...
How can I use Prolog to actually get something done, other than academic tasks? Say I want to use it as a database query language, presumably that's not going to happen, right?
[1]: https://dcnorris.github.io/precautionary/index.html
[2]: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2441
[3]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-97-2300-3_...
Regarding how, check out Power of Prolog on YouTube.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using SQL is perfectly fine. Datalog on the other hand is absurdly hard to work with.
To each their own. Others would say datalog elegant and makes it easy to compose statements whereas SQL has an ugly syntax. I mean, ORMs were invented to try to avoid writing SQL but they too have their own problems.
Speak for yourself. I’ve always found it to be very clear and concise.
SELECT FROM [[type of] JOIN other_table ON ?, …] [WHERE ? [boolean operator], …] [ORDER BY ? [DESC]] [LIMIT ?]I have a long standing love affair with Prolog and frustration for its failure to grow. Prolog has poor features for abstraction and is actually not declarative enough! Prolog's limitations can be great for starting to get the paradigm but then you hit a wall. (Kind of like standard Pascal!) Mercury and Curry fix some of these limitations as does miniKanren. Integrating CLP is important yet so far always clumsy as st…
Respectfully have to disagree. Prolog has the best features for abstraction of any language I've used, I suspect it may be near an optimal fixed point for metaprogramming expression[3]. I will say the other side of that wall is breathtaking. Also not sure what you mean, CLP is a first class consideration in many Prologs, esp Scryer Prolog. Check these crazy demos out: [1] https://youtu.be/h5Xy4YjCZxM [2] https://yout…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully have to disagree. Prolog has the best features for abstraction of any language I've used, I suspect it may be near an optimal fixed point for metaprogramming expression[3]. I will say the other side of that wall is breathtaking. Also not sure what you mean, CLP is a first class consideration in many Prologs, esp Scryer Prolog. Check these crazy demos out: [1] https://youtu.be/h5Xy4YjCZxM [2] https://yout…
And I have yet to understand this.
I always enjoy reading positive pieces about Prolog but without touching on the implications of the principles on display, this article may do more harm than good. You would ask reasonable questions like, "for God's sake, why ?". It feels like you wouldn't use Prolog for anything besides an intellectual game. Regarding the why : Some of those reasons include Definite Clause Grammars, Meta-Interpreters, 1st class cons…
I have a long standing love affair with Prolog and frustration for its failure to grow. Prolog has poor features for abstraction and is actually not declarative enough! Prolog's limitations can be great for starting to get the paradigm but then you hit a wall. (Kind of like standard Pascal!) Mercury and Curry fix some of these limitations as does miniKanren. Integrating CLP is important yet so far always clumsy as st…
Respectfully have to disagree. Prolog has the best features for abstraction of any language I've used, I suspect it may be near an optimal fixed point for metaprogramming expression[3]. I will say the other side of that wall is breathtaking. Also not sure what you mean, CLP is a first class consideration in many Prologs, esp Scryer Prolog. Check these crazy demos out: [1] https://youtu.be/h5Xy4YjCZxM [2] https://yout…
For example, imagine I'm writing a maze solver. The maze solver predicate receives obviously, but it has to pass as a parameter the maze again and again to all sub-predicates. There is no concept of "current maze", like in OO you would have with this.maze, or in Haskell you would do with a reader monad. As a result, all the "internal" predicates in a module get full of parameters all they do is pass around until some final predicate uses it to do some calculation.
Either that or you do the assert/retract dance and now you have bigger problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully have to disagree. Prolog has the best features for abstraction of any language I've used, I suspect it may be near an optimal fixed point for metaprogramming expression[3]. I will say the other side of that wall is breathtaking. Also not sure what you mean, CLP is a first class consideration in many Prologs, esp Scryer Prolog. Check these crazy demos out: [1] https://youtu.be/h5Xy4YjCZxM [2] https://yout…
And I have yet to understand this.