Prolog Coding Horror

71 points25 comments7 hours ago
schmuhblaster

As someone who has developed a somewhat weird obsession with Prolog, I can highly recommend Markus Triska's other articles on Prolog. His article on meta-interpreters [0] was particularly inspiring for me.

[0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/prolog_misc/acomip....

rtpg

There's something quite illuminating with this first "horror", where they basically say "it's OK to report wrong answers, because you can check the answers".

I don't think I've ever felt like it's OK for my program to provide a list of answers where some are right and some are wrong, but reading this... and generally believing in P != NP.... maybe that's a decent way of looking at some stuff!

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mmastrac

If you want to understand prolog, you must understand the four-port model:

https://grack.com/writing/school/enel553/report/prolog.html

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appil

What do people use Prolog for in the real world? I learned about it on a university course and it seems so esoteric compared to other things on the course. Like something invented just for computer scientists to enjoy.

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txhwind

now we may have a more powerful "Prolog" - LLM Agent, though not precise and correct somtimes.

crustycoder

Mostly overblown.