I've been studying Rete for the past few years, and I've been working exclusively in CLIPS for the past year, a programming language that uses the Rete Algorithm at it's core. It's a very clever algorithm, and provides a lot of "nice features" that developers find themselves re-implementing in mature code bases. Things like:

- pattern matching - custom DSL - caching

I find it difficult to summarize in an "elevator pitch," and I only started seeing things fall into place after trying to use it in earnest on my own. I highly recommend reading the CLIPS documentation posted on the main CLIPS website. The PDFs are long, but quite complete and well written.

Self promotion: If you prefer something a little more interactive, check out the Tour of CLIPS I made: https://ryjo.codes/tour-of-clips.html

Just a heads up: this is not light reading. Rules-based programming is a confusing departure from traditional programming; there's more "magic" involved, similar to convention-over-configutation in other languages/frameworks. The benefits outweigh the upfront learning cost, though.

Here is a recent post on HN that recently got some traction and has some pretty good discussions: Tour of CLIPS (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201729

If anyone is working directly with CLIPS, let me know! I'm actively working on a low level networking library called CLIPSockets, and would like to work with the language full time some day.