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The Mercury logic programming system

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11–20 of 24 posts

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#12

Last release was in 2023. It is effectively dead. This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.

Last commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.

I always understood it was a teaching language for students who wanted to get programming language implementation experience.

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#14

Oh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.

I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#18

Oh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.

I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.

It was called "433-252 Software Engineering Principles & Tools" until ~2008 I think (433-244 before that) but then it seems to have been reorganised. Tbh, Unimelb Comp Sci is a shadow of it's former self, a victim of the 'Melbourne Model' common core sausage factory concept.

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.

It was called "433-252 Software Engineering Principles & Tools" until ~2008 I think (433-244 before that) but then it seems to have been reorganised. Tbh, Unimelb Comp Sci is a shadow of it's former self, a victim of the 'Melbourne Model' common core sausage factory concept.

Is it the same model as the "Bologna process" in Europe, which is kind of funny because "Bologna" also refers to a type of sausage in the US of A.

Re: The Mercury logic programming system

#20
Something you might find interesting to look at is Rego, a datalog-derived language been used for writing security policies. Rego is dynamically typed, so no real protection. It's input is basically JSON and it can apply JSON-Schema, but that's it. I think it would be interesting to look at Rego as a restricted version of this and see what types buys for a Rego user. It's probably one of the larger areas of logic programming and has brought people into the fold, so to speak.
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