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Comment by _nato_ | Hacker News Reader

The father of Erlang, Joe Armstrong, lauds this language every time he gets a chance. And I think the hate on Erlang syntax comes from the fact that a first stab at Erlang was done with Prolog. But I actually like the Erlang syntax after I got used to it. It reads like English ~

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There's a great article describing the start of Erlang as a Prolog metainterpreter. It's very accessible, at least I can follow it with my month old Prolog knowledge and it's quite impressive to watch as the interpreter goes from nothing to basic concurrency in a few lines of code:

http://www.sics.se/~joe/pubs/prac_appl_prolog.ps‎

I'm taking a class that has some Prolog content and I've been playing with my own toy implementation. Fun stuff.

> It reads like English

My sentiments exactly. Atoms and pattern matching make my programs highly readable.

When I was starting out in erlang I read a lot of complaints on erlang's syntax. But after a day or two I got comfortable around it.

Is there a more accessible intro to Prolog for someone who is a sysadmin and is trying to write more code.

I recently started reading http://www.learnprolognow.org/ and the first few chapters have been excellent. There are exercises and practical sections at the end of each chapter too (unfortunately I haven't had time to look at them in detail yet).

Thanks everyone much appreciated

I've looked at and read a bunch of different Prolog books. In my opinion the best one is `Programming in Prolog: Using the ISO Standard' by Clocksin & Mellish. It's actually one of my favorite programming books. Do all the exercises!

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Prolog-Using-ISO-Standard/...

http://www.swi-prolog.org/

If you are looking for an on-line resource nick_dm's suggestion for http://www.learnprolognow.org/ is spot on.

If you would like a book, I cannot recommend "The Art of Prolog" by Sterling and Shapiro enough. It gives a very understandable introduction to the language and is focused on teaching you how to approach different problem spaces while "thinking" in Prolog.

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