Comments on: Why Learning Prolog Can Make You a Better Programmer

By: jesus smith

jesus smith — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:14:24 +0000

I used Turbo Prolog to provide small applications for users at Redcliffe City Council, 1990-1994. (Jim in Health, Andrew Osborne in the Library). I also completed work for for Spencer Yule in plumbing – graphs of water data – and Trevor Green in Health – image processing but did not use them. I also wrote a sort for Bill Darch because his MS-DOS sort would not handle the amount of data. In hindsight of course, I should have asked him to buy a new computer. I also wrote code to solve Lewis Carrol’s zebra problem, and also wrote to study the text of an RFT for the accounting system.

With unlimited storage today for source code, it would make sense to keep all the code we wrote as part of a running system.

Also wrote word counting application in 1990.

What I would like to do now is to find gapped n-grams. Perhaps it is possible to find some gapped n-grams which fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Will use an evaluation copy of SIcstus Prolog for now because I used Sicstus before at Macquarie in 2002.

I also hope to go over some of the code in one of Covington’s books on NLP.

By: AlwaysProgrammedProcedurally

AlwaysProgrammedProcedurally — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:40:51 +0000

A good little post on the benefits of Prolog. I agree with some of the posts that it is tailor-made for some problems, but that is the same with many things. Horses for courses.

I recently joined a system-control project which essentially had a core task of programming a 150-page document of rules into an application. That application was in C#. I have been an procedural programmer (C/C++) for years, but in the back of my mind was a niggling voice saying that Prolog was the perfect language for this application.

I showed a few people how I was able to implement some of the rules in about as many lines as they took to specify in the document, rather than the 100s that it took in C#. They were impressed.

I am not discounting the application of the mainstream procedural languages, but one of the points of this article is to be aware of the other paradigms, and I for one think that the best programmers know of the other programming paradigms and when it is best to make use of them.

By: Linkdump #48: Poczytajmy… sobie. « Tomasz Kowalczyk

Linkdump #48: Poczytajmy… sobie. « Tomasz Kowalczyk — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:23:55 +0000

[...] Why Learning Prolog Can Make You a Better Programmer. Dlaczego nauka j?zyka Prolog uczyni Ciebie lepszym programist?. [...]

By: ??????Prolog????????????? | Article2 Web

??????Prolog????????????? | Article2 Web — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:30:57 +0000

[...] Why Learning Prolog Can Make You a Better Programmer [...]

By: Adelar

Adelar — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:09:09 +0000

Good post. I agree with you. Prolog is a great language, but if applied properly.

By: Veteran

Veteran — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 05:04:44 +0000

A long time ago, I used Arity Prolog to parse ISCN notation describing human chromosomal abnormalities, so that one could search patients for a given abnormality (eg. Down Syndrome). Conventional databases wouldn’t work because string searching was not possible, since a given abnormality could have multiple descriptions. Fortunately, ISCN strings could be viewed as Prolog terms, so the program was all about writing hundreds of rules using Prolog’s notion of a variable. The whole package compiled to a 325K .EXE file and was blindingly fast. Prolog was tailor-made for this task.

By: coliveira

coliveira — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:15:02 +0000

@ Steve this really looks like a cool application. Creating a rule-based system for this is the most effective way to do automation.

@Pedro I guess it depends on the lab where the research is performed. Most research on Prolog is done in Europe and Asia. For example, it was used to implement Erlang in Ericsson. A lot of natural language research is still done in Europe using Prolog. In the USA, however, it is hard to compete with Lisp and relatives, since most systems have been implemented in these languages.

By: Pedro

Pedro — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:11:35 +0000

“currently Prolog is better suited for AI-related projects”. Which projects? Computer vision? Don’t think so. Machine learning? New research is using massive amounts of stats and mathematica programming. Natural language processing? Same thing.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:39:16 +0000

A long time ago I played with Prolog and thought it would make an interesting “brain” for a home automation system, so I wrote one. The Prolog rules are great for specifying the systems behavior in response to events. The system has now been running things in my house for almost 10 years.

By: coliveira

coliveira — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:02:42 +0000

I think Prolog is a language that can be used for real projects. It depends, however, on the type of project you want. Currently Prolog is better suited for AI-related projects. It could be extended to other domains, but the problem is that there is no critical mass of programmers trying to do this. Performance is currently an issue but it could vastly be improved if there were investments such is what is happening to Javascript (and happened with Java)