Re: Much interest in SWI-Prolog at Strange Loop!

> If SWI-Prolog is going to win in that race, it needs to be surrounded by more mainstream tools.
> 
> Part of this is indeed chicken and egg. Mainstream programmers will tend to do things like improve
> the ODBC support, provide support for javascript libraries, etc

I think that the ODBC support is pretty stable and feature-rich, mainly
it because it has been used for a long time by commercial users.  Surely,
your next point applies.  We could also improve the integration using
quasi quotations.  That would make your next point even stronger.

I agree - my point was not that we need to work on those two areas specifically but that the more
"mainstream" people in the community, the more of this sort of work will be needed, and conversely
the more hands there will be to do it. 

JavaScript integration has made a huge step with quasi quotations, but
there is indeed still a lot of work to do.

> " Prolog has some amazing ideas and tools in its cultural
> heritage, but many of them are unavailable for production use without
> wading through old journal articles and conference proceedings."

So true.  Well, most is in the manuals.  To get the picture you need
to read articles, study examples from the libraries and some accessible
applications.  Practically none of this material has been written as
a tutorial :-(  Also, a lot of this material could have been written in
much better style by exploiting recent insights.


Maybe we ought to find someone willing to write a textbook?  This could
work more or less the same way as your and Michael's tutorials but of
course this is much more involved ...  Unlike existing Prolog textbooks
that mostly concentrate on algorithm design, this should concentrate on
program structuring and how to solve problems using SWI-Prolog's
libraries (HTTP, HTML, RDF, ...)
Agreed!  -  Especially the last sentence.

 I had a longish conversation with the folks from O'Reilly publishing about
the process of getting a book published. 
Essentially, we go to them and say 'we think there's enough interest now to support a book'.
They put out feelers on some of their blogs, and if there's enough interest they start the process.
how long it takes to actually write depends totally on the author. Once they have final manuscript it's 
60-90 days until the book appears.  

I told them it was just a little early for their 'feel test' but I'd ping them when we thought it was time.

I'm friends with several authors of equivalent books, all say it's a lot of work. But it probably does need
done. The editors said many authors do something like an hour a day or one day a week, and do about a chapter
a week.