A Prolog Introduction for Hackers

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/25/124713/784

by marshallp • 17 years ago

52 13 17 years ago

henning• 17 years ago

Every one of you owes it to yourself to read The Art of Prolog. If you liked On Lisp, SICP, or Paradigms of AI Programming you will love it and it will change how you view programming. And, as Alan Kay said, point of view is worth 80 IQ points.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

Absolutely. While some of the other introductions to Prolog cover the language quite well (_Programming in Prolog_ by Clocksin & Mellish is good), _The Art of Prolog_ unapologetically dives headfirst into the deep ideas in logic programming, then comes back to the surface and shows how standard Prolog captures them. Its focus on the big ideas ties it less to Prolog, and it sits very comfortably next to books such as SICP and CTM.

It's out of print and a bit expensive ($80-130ish), but the first edition goes for much cheaper. Prolog standardized between the two editions, and the second edition has 100+ pages of new material (including projects), but the former (closer to $6) will give you a pretty good taste.

parenthesis• 17 years ago

The Art of Prolog is available new from amazon.co.uk :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-PROLOG-Advanced-Programming-Tech...

gchpaco2• 17 years ago

A pretty minimal introduction to the language; it doesn't much discuss why one would prefer programming in Prolog to writing the same things in Erlang or Scheme. But within its scope it's pretty fair.

hristov2• 17 years ago

Well, prolog is especially good at a certain task. And that is storing and dealing with logically organized language like data. Back in the time, people used to refer to this as storing and dealing with knowledge instead of data.

The main idea of prolog is to kind of mimic the way the human mind stores knowledge. So eventually one would be able to store the knowledge obtained by an extpert, such as a botanist, engineer, car mechanic, attorney, etc. and be able to recall it or use it to solve problems in simple language like queries.

That is a pretty ambitious goal and, to the best of my knowledge, I don't think it has ever really worked. Nevertheless, it is a very cool language and its ultimate goal may work now that computing power is so high.

hristov2• 17 years ago

Wow this brings back memories. I studied this language in europe back when I was a kid (must have been around 20 years ago). Very interesting and it definitely changes the way one thinks about programming. Too bad the purpose it was written for (the so called expert systems) never really became popular.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

> Too bad the purpose it was written for (the so called expert systems) never really became popular

My impression is that expert systems became too popular (for a while, they were an overworked subject in CS academia and industrial hype literature alike) and died from an excess of broken promises.

gchpaco2• 17 years ago

Expert systems are everywhere, actually; it's just that nobody hypes them much any more.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

Learn Prolog Now (http://learnprolognow.org/) is covers the basics better, IMHO, as does _Programming in Prolog_ by Clocksin & Mellish.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

("is covers"? Oops. Missed the edit window.)

As an aside: There is a really good section on Prolog in Chapter 7 (Logic Programming) in CTM. Peter Van Roy is quite familiar with Prolog (including several published articles about efficient implementation), and he includes a good summary of its strengths and weaknesses. The chapter on amb/backtracking in SICP doesn't really do Prolog justice, IMHO.

dfarm• 17 years ago

Holy %*&% -- I didn't know kuro5hin was still around...

Seems like semantic web stuff today is Prolog on the network. I still need to learn it at some point.

A Prolog Introduction for Hackers

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