"Datafun: a functional query language" by Michael Arntzenius on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2018–2025.
talk · intermediate · evergreen
Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.
HN recommends it as an approachable talk on a total functional generalization of Datalog, by the language's author.
“Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk.”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Yes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is "monotonicity". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics. Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk. [link] ▶ this video
in “Implementing Logic Programming” · View on HN
"Streams of solution trees" kinda reminds me of mikro-kanren [1]. When I was using Clojure roughly 3 years ago, kanren was quite popular embedded logic. W.r.t. Datafun, i learned about it from a talk its creator gave on strangeloop last year [2], for me it seemed quite approachable :) [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video
in “A relatively simple Datalog engine” · View on HN
Thanks for sharing the summary. There's also this Strange Loop 2017 talk "Datafun: a functional query language" with an early overview of this research: ▶ this video
in “Deconstructing Datalog [pdf]” · View on HN
This talk explored a bit that idea, you could have a (full) programming language which is more like SQL so you get good enough datastructures (and indexing- without manual tuning: ▶ this video I think Prolog (another commenter pointed it out) and datalog do this to some extend.
in “Why Can't Database Tables Index Themselves? (2006)” · View on HN