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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

On my degree we had two tracks on logic programming, the first one just using a visual language for logic and the second one with Swift Prolog, shared between EE and CS degrees, for some of us like myself it just felt natural but the majority hated those lectures.

Logic programming seems to be like monads, either you get it or not, but it is hard to explain to others.

Prolog and Lisp were the two languages we were forbidden to use in compiler design project, as it was considered "cheating" versus using something harder like C.

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> Prolog and Lisp were the two languages we were forbidden to use in compiler design project, as it was considered "cheating" versus using something harder like C.

"Cheating"? Smells like a chance for the revenge of the pattern-matching metacompiler!

then use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_%28programming_languag...

feels like lego where prolog is duplo.

I know Mercury, but your advice is about 20 years too late. :)

For me Mercury is sort of an objective "best language". You can do logic programming, functional programming, and you get the same type-level expressivity as an ML.

The implementation and ecosystem are quite far from something like Python, of course, but it does look like the most beautiful house in the street to me when you just walk past it.

> [Mercury] feels like lego where prolog is duplo.

Except for things like the system described in the featured article, where the unique strength of Prolog is the ability to pass around partially instantiated data structures and use full unification. Last time I checked, Mercury still insisted that terms be ground (or completely free variables), which means that for this kind of problem you don't gain much from its flavor of logic programming :-(

> Prolog and Lisp were the two languages we were forbidden to use in compiler design project

Haskell/Ocaml/SML? :3

OCaml was still called Objective Caml and far from replacing Caml Light, which we were starting to use.

Haskell was still not a thing our department cared about, although we got to read some stuff about Miranda.

SML was never a thing at our university.

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