Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Right now this seems to have all the downsides of programming exclusively with "magic strings", and I haven't been able to find any cure for it or even seen this problem discussed elsewhere. The cure is to not try to program with "magic strings". You don't need to, and if you really want to, then you should try to understand what exactly it is that you're doing, and do it right. Specifically, what you call "magic…
Let me thank you also for sharing those resources and acknowledging this is a tricky problem for newcomers. I do love Prolog and I used to think I was a very careful coder with significant attention to detail, but Prolog is exposing what a clumsy buffoon I am if I don't have significant IDE support or "crash on typo" support. I am particularly grateful because most of the books as you know were written a long time ag…
>> the dang thing about Prolog is the more you look into it, the more powerful you realize it is, but I'll be damned if it's not impossible to find these things out without someone telling you about them. Most languages seem to be possible to self-teach, but if I were to self-teach Prolog I never would've learned about the concept of monotonicity and I'd be using cut operators willy-nilly etc, lucky that I stumbled on Markus's blog/videos and lucky that I bumped into you!
I hear you. When I first learned Prolog, in the second year of my CS degree course, the first thing I did was to go to my university's library and gather up all the textbooks I could find about it. I literally came home bent over from the sheer weight of books. It still took me a very long time to learn the ins and outs of it. It doesn't help that Prolog has a small and probably shrinking community and many of the people with long backgrounds and deep knowledge of its practice are starting to retire from public fora; like O'Keefe.
There are only a few resources on the internet that can help you understand Prolog. Markus Triska's as you found out is one of the best (although I have a very different view of many things than he does, there's no doubt he is an expert in the language). When I was learning I got a lot of mileage out of a tutorial on the Amzi Prolog website:
https://amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/index.php
The best thing you can do of course is to keep working with it as much as you can. Things eventually make sense and you learn what works and what doesn't with experience. That's not always easy to do of course. As I say in another comment I had to leave (my lucrative career in) the industry and enter academia (which pays peanuts) to find a place where I could really work as much as I wanted with Prolog.
>> I am actually really shocked to hear that the advice is to roll your own type system, and it's really interesting. I wonder if that is also the case for other expressive languages such as Forth/PostScript, etc. Most of the languages I work with more often (Python/JS/TypeScript/Clojure/C# ... but PARTICULARLY Python) tend to view runtime assertions and type-checking as an anti-pattern.
I don't want to sound even more like a zealot than I already do, but the thing is you can do all that in Prolog more easily than in other languages. In general the way I program in Prolog is that I create a language to describe my problem, and then solve my problem in that language. I don't mean that I necessarily design a new programming language and write a parser for it, although you can do that very easily in Prolog with Definite Clause Grammars (you get a decent parser and generator that way though not optimal). I mean that I make up a language to talk about the domain, and use it to describe my problems and their solutions. You do that too, in your solution/3 predicate above, where as far as I can tell you describe resources and actions of a robot etc. Again Prolog lets you do that easily: you can define the abstractions you need. That goes all the way up to the abstractions used in other programming paradigms, like functions or objects etc, and types.
>> I am particularly grateful because most of the books as you know were written a long time ago and tend to focus more on the beauty of the language and tend to gloss over the software engineering or composing large reliable problems.
Yeah, I tend to ignore those things. I love Prolog but I recognise it's not to everyone's taste. It's quite obvious. It's nice to hear you love it too :)