Strange Loop Conference
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2015–2023
39:58 · 58K views · Sep 21, 2014
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.
10 comments from Hacker News
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]
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
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
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]
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