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Comment by qohen | Hacker News Reader

ROFL.

Like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog was used primarily in the 1980s, so it was run on Unix workstations and also, to some extent, on PCs. (There were even efforts to create hardware designed to run Prolog a la Lisp machines.)

And, like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog can be very nice for iterative development/rapid prototyping (where the prototypes might be good enough to put into production).

The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0]

[0] https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/prolog/

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I mean there are nearly two full decades between the appearance of Prolog(1972) and PC revolution late 1980s and early 1990s.

>>The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0]

That's like a decade of work. Thats hardly early 'days'.

Also the programming culture in the PC days and before that is totally different. Heck even the editors from that era(eg vi), are designed for an entirely different workflow. That is, lots of planning, and correctness before you decided to input the code into the computer.

By 1979 at the latest -- probably closer to 1975 -- the primary Prolog implementation of the day (Warren's DEC-10 version) had an interpreter, where you could load files of code in and modify the code and you had a REPL with the ability to do all kinds of things.

I posted an excerpt of the manual, with a link to a PDF of it, in a reply to another comment [0]

(And, since even the earliest versions of Prolog were interpreted, they may've had features like this too).

And, as far as editors are concerned, people still use versions of vi (and, of course, emacs) to this day by people who don't necessarily do lots of planning and correctness before deciding to input the code into the computer.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664671

And one other thing: just because early Prolog interpreters were implemented on punchcards doesn't mean that Prolog programs run by those interpreters needed to be. It's quite possible that basically nobody ever wrote Prolog programs using punchcards, given that Prolog has the ability to read in files of code and data.

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