Ah OK thanks for the link. Since it depends on commercial software, I don't see a path to trying it (which is fine, because I probably don't have time anyway :-/ )

So are you saying that it's more conventional to serialize relations from C++ or Python, rather than serialize an AST as I was suggesting?

Your blog post mentions ASTs too, so I'm not quite clear on that point. I don't have much experience writing such analyzers, and I'd be interested if there is any wisdom / examples on serializing ASTs vs. relations, and if the relations are at the "same level" as the AST, or a higher level of abstraction, etc.

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FWIW I read a bunch of the papers by Yannis because I'm interested in experiences of using high level languages in production:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666658

After all the reason I like shell and R is that they're both higher level than Python or JS :)

I like short code, and Datalog seems interesting in that regard. I also hacked on this Python type inferencer in Prolog awhile ago:

https://github.com/andychu/hatlog

I did get hung up on writing simple pure functions in Prolog. There seems to be a debate over whether unification "deserves" its own first-class language, or whether it should be a library in a bigger language, and after that experience, I would lean toward the latter. I didn't really see the light in Prolog. Error messages were a problem -- for the user of the program, and for the developer of the program (me).

So while I haven't looked at Formulog yet, it definitely seems like a good idea to marry some "normal" programming conveniences with Datalog!