My Gripes with Prolog

5 comments

• infotainment 1 hour ago
  I always felt like Prolog's ability to execute programs was entirely accidental.

  To me, it feels like a data description language that someone discovered could be tricked into performing computation.

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  • hwayne 1 hour ago
    Check out datalog! https://learn-some.com/ The tutorial there uses Clojure syntax but Datalog normally uses a Prolog syntax.
  • jjgreen 1 hour ago
    ... a bit like life ...
• shawn_w 20 minutes ago
  I frequently find myself thinking "this would be a great fit for prolog etc." but always fail when it comes to the execution.
• doorhammer 31 minutes ago
  I always come back to prolog to tool around with it but haven’t done a ton.

  Bidirectionality has always been super fascinating.

  Didn’t know about Picat. 100% going to check it out.

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  • hwayne 10 minutes ago
    I'll warn you that Picat is very much a "research language" and a lot of the affordances you'd expect with a polished PL just aren't there yet. There's also this really great "field notes" repo from another person who learned it: https://github.com/dsagman/picat
• egl2020 45 minutes ago
  Maybe it's just me, but my gripe is that it looks declarative, but you have to read the code in execution order.
• boxed 3 minutes ago
  The line reorder issue is evergreen and it seems all languages need to either go through this phase and fix it, or gaslight its users forever that it's "not really a problem".