"Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks on HackerTube: recommended by 6 Hacker News commenters across 6 separate months, 2015–2023.
talk · intermediate · evergreen
Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.
It is the go-to answer to whether Prolog is used for real-world work, praised as a survey of its uses, advantages and drawbacks.
“gives an excellent high-level survey of the uses, advantages, and drawbacks of Prolog”
10 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
For an awesome video showcasing a bit of the real power of Prolog, you need to check (if you haven't already) this Strangeloop talk: "Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks ▶ this video
in “Swish: SWI Prolog Notebook” · View on HN
You might be interested in these SO answers regarding "Real world Prolog Usage": [link] The answers are replete with claims about good use-cases for Prolog. Michael Hendricks' talk at last year's Strange Loop on "Production Prolog" gives an excellent high-level survey of the uses, advantages, and drawbacks of Prolog: ▶ this video BTW, I have played a tiny bit with Flora2 myself. It seemed really neat. If you're interested in the intersection of OO and Prolog, you may also want to look at Logtalk[0]. FWIW, if I understand your meaning correctly, it is very easy to "pass rules as parameters to other rules" in vanilla Prolog. It facilitates all sorts of higher-order approaches and is very good for meta-programming. [0]: [link]
in “Learn Prolog Now” · View on HN
Check out "Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks on YouTube, which demonstrates the same thing, at a talk at StrangeLoop: ▶ this video
in “Tar.pl – A tar creator and extractor in approx. 100 lines of Prolog” · View on HN
I recommend starting with [0] to get a feel for what's possible. [1] is great when you have time to dive deeper. [2] is good motivation, and [3] will show you how to build a practical roles & permissions system. Keep in mind that you don't have to build your app in 100% prolog to use prolog. There are likely implementations in your favorite language. For example, Rust[a] JavaScript[b], and Ruby[c]. [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video [3] [link] [a] [link] [b] [link] [c] [link]
in “Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?” · View on HN
Same here, I don't think this is a particularly great way of starting with Prolog. I have found these videos helpful for understanding Prolog: [link] ▶ this video
in “The Power of Prolog” · View on HN
I found a page from 1994(!) asking the same question: [link] Given that Prolog isn't super-widely used (compared to say, C++), there are going to be a limited number of developers with Prolog expertise. That means companies who use it in their tech stack are generally going to have to hire developers who fit the other qualifications for the role then put them through some internal Prolog training. The listings for such positions probably won't have Prolog as a "required" skill but a "desired" skill. One other point -- just because there aren't any/many jobs where Prolog is required doesn't mean there aren't many cases where Prolog could be useful. Prolog hasn't been widely taught for a couple of decades, so a significant proportion of developers today won't recognize a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for as a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for. There's a Strange Loop 2014 talk on YouTube, "Production Prolog", that might give ideas about jobs that use (or could use) Prolog: ▶ this video
in “Learn Prolog Now” · View on HN
Not only is it worthwhile to learn, it's worthwhile to use for real world problems: ▶ this video From his blog: [link]
in “Prolog Programming Language (1997)” · View on HN
Prolog also has some really impressive debugging tools. It allows you to pause execution, change the code, and then resume execution from an earlier point in time . Michael Hendrick's "Production Prolog" talk gives a demo of this (at 12:17) ▶ this video
in “The FAQ of comp.lang.prolog is maintained as a Prolog source file” · View on HN
Yes. I'd love to know more about real world use cases. Edit: Found some relevant threads and links: [link] ▶ this video
in “Learn Prolog Now” · View on HN
> Hmm I'm fine with prolog, I love it, but I'm not sure how it can be used in practice. Well, that rings similar to what is said about Lisp sometimes, and I think it can easily be refuted by pointing to instances where it is being used in practice[0]. There are some problems that are fairly easy to solve in Prolog, but would be very difficult to express in SQL[1]. And recursive relations, which are at the core of Prolog, only made their way into SQLite 4 years ago[2]. My comment was specifically about those Prolog/Datalog implementations in Racket . Other Prolog implementations might be dealing sensibly with incremental updates (but I don't know). > Having seen companies where SQL was used very extensively for analytics, data storage etc I can't see how prolog wouldn't help. You can't see how Prolog wouldn't help, as in Prolog can only be an improvement over SQL? [0]: ▶ this video [1]: [link] [2]: [link]
in “Racklog: Prolog Style Logic Programming [pdf]” · View on HN