Re: Exposing Perl programmers to logic programming

On 8 Mar 2005, at 20:46, Ovid wrote:
> --- Mark Kvale <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
>> 1) Prolog was hot in the 80's but is hardly ever used these days. If
>> it hasn't stood the test of time, why should I care?
>
> Prolog has traditionally been viewed as rather slow and, due to the
> nature of its design, debugging is sometimes a painful experience.
> Further, because so many programmes are weaned on imperative or OO
> languages, Prolog just seems "foreign".  Building large applications
> can be cumbersome, as a result of these factors.
[snip]

I think another reason Prolog didn't catch on is that it got a bad rap 
as an "AI" language (along with Lisp and, to a lesser extent, 
Smalltalk) and suffered in the post-hype AI winter of the late eighties 
/ early nineties.

It's also a far bigger leap in style. If you're used to procedural 
programming you can carry on writing procedural code in most OO 
languages (indeed a depressing number of people do just that in my 
experience :-) With Prolog, and similar languages, you've got to jump 
in with both feet.

Cheers,

Adrian