Re: Announcement: Homage to SWI-Prolog

Ceyhun and Richard,

Thank you for your input. I respond to some of your comments below:

Ceyhun> Saving and updating do not work, therefore no sharing.

Hmm, it works for me. Do you by any chance use Internet Explorer?
SWISH has not yet been tested on IE.

Richard> The red "Error: /storage/technology does not exist" is enough
to scare me off.

Thanks, that is indeed a bug. It happens when the address bar gets
updated as a consequence of the user clicking a link in the table of
contents of the help section.

Richard> SWISH is this much like JSFIDDLE: they both fail the beginner
test. Someone arrives at one of these things for the first time? They
need to see a paragraph of explanation and a paragraph of
instructions.

I'll try to add that in the next version.

Richard> In deleting the query I had typed, I was dismayed to see that
the "?-" went too.  Had I completely broken the thing?  Would any
query ever work again.  (_Serious_ question.  I genuinely believed it
possible that the interface would not work again.)

It is hard to do much about that. That is why I provide the Clear
button underneath the query field instead.

Richard> Finally despairingly I click on "Solve": in 34 happy Prolog
years I've never heard "Solve" used for this
before.

Must say I find it a bit odd you haven't heard "solve" in the context
of "solve a goal". A google search such as
<https://www.google.se/?q=%22solve+a|the+goal%22+prolog> gave nearly
20,000 hits. What would you prefer? "Run"? "Prove"? "First"? "Ask"?
"Execute"? Or something else?

Richard> Typing a query in one box (so that my eyes have to be
pointing down there) and then having the answers appear way up
somewhere else reminds me of the old Apollo interface, which I
couldn't get away from fast enough.

I contemplated implementing a more conventional command line interface
but it somehow felt weird to have that in a browser.

Richard> It doesn't make sense that I can't call current_predicate/1.

Jan's library(sandbox) does not yet list current_predicate/1 as safe.
I have added some safe predicates to his list, but not all. I will add
current_predicate/1 in the next version.

Richard> The syntax colouring is weird.

Yes, I'm aware of that. It even says so in the Help section under
Issues. The JS syntax colouring code is part of ACE, the editor that
I'm using. Jan is working on another approach to syntax colouring,
using the CodeMirror editor. I think I prefer to wait for what he
might come up with, rather than trying to fix the prolog mode of ACE.

Richard>I am in awe of the web-fu demonstrated by this project, but I
cannot imagine wanting to share code this way instead of using github
or putting stuff on my own page.

JSFIDDLE and JS BIN seem to be used a lot, so maybe others want to use
SWISH. Be that as it may, I myself see the server code and the APIs as
the important parts here, and SWISH as just a demonstration hinting at
what can be done on top of these. Ah well, a bit more than a
demonstration I suppose, since I do believe that something along the
lines of JSFIDDLE can serve its purpose -- to easily share code and
programming examples -- in any programming language community, for any
language. It is easier for JavaScript of course, since one does not
need to worry so much about non-determinism, server-side execution and
safety.

Thanks again for your input.

Best regards,
Torbjörn