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Comment by pipo234 | Hacker News Reader

Curious to learn whether Prolog is still an integral part for contemporary CS (proposition, predicate) Logic curriculum, natural language parsing, etc. I suppose that the built-in backtracking was the most controversial aspect, so maybe attention has shifted to Erlang, Haskell or esoteric languages like (wild) life?

Anyone currently in education care to comment?

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I recently did a stint as a TA for my university's undergraduate Prolog course. It's pretty much an elective here with the main goal of introducing students to a a different paradigm. Applications of Prolog for natural language were discussed but not the main focus. I reckon that the FP course (using Haskell) touch more about parsing (using parser combinators) than the Prolog course.

As a student, I learned Prolog and Caml in a master's in CS in France, in 2015, though the languages we were most likely to use like Java and C had much more hours of class. I think the teachers, who are also researchers, rarely update the technologies they teach because it's often what they learned when they started teaching.

That sounds very familiar. ;-) (For the similar reasons I learned Pascal, Modula 2, Ada when I ought to have learned about C++, Java)

If you were a teacher now, having to explain about predicate logic and proof automation, would you choose teaching Prolog? If not, which language would you choose?

I work as a web developer, and rarely use exotic paradigms like Prolog's logic programming or OCaml's functional programming, so I do not know many alternatives, but I like the value of showing all of these to students, so I'm still ok with teaching Prolog to students, because I'm not familiar with alternatives.

If I knew alternatives that were very recent, like 4-5 years old, I'd be careful replacing the current courses, because often in technology, statistically, if something has been there for a long time, it'll be there for a long time, and many new things die young.

Both my B.Sc./Ma.Sc. and Phd institutions (Germany) currently teach Prolog as an elective. One does it as a Bachelor's course of symbolic AI and the other does it as a master's course in Logic Programming and Deductive Databases (together with Datalog).

AFIK all CS B.Sc./Ma.Sc. have logic (theory) in their curriculum often as a required curse, sometimes as part of other courses.

Many but not all do also have logic programming in some form. Through that might be just some side project of another course, or might not be done using Prolog.

I graduated in 2019 and studied Prolog in my third year.

I’ve learned it for a predicate logic (satisfying logic requirements) course in 2019 during a Bsc

Still common in Portuguese universities, at least mine still has it on the curriculum.

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