Who Killed Prolog? (2010)

Prolog isn't dead, it just doesn't seem to get a whole lot of attention these days. I use SWI-Prolog for prototyping and exploratory programming, and I didn't need a shovel and a lantern to install it. I don't think Prolog is practical as a fully standalone language, though. Like SQL, it has a model that strongly skews it towards certain kinds of problems, and which makes I/O and side effects awkward. I think it would be best to have a…

One of the reasons C is the way it is is that that way is the way the processor is. The abstraction isn't perfect, but it is decent enough for a first approximation. I'm guessing Fortran is similar. Imperitive languages of that era were used because they worked very closely with the actual actions of the CPU and gave a fine grained control over execution, allowing efficiencies. Since then, popular languages have all been improvements that take advantage of increased…

Article assumes technology is adopted top-down, from the powers that be. While that was true at the time of mainframes, for a while now, technology is often adopted bottom-up, particularly in startups that are free to use the most effective tool for the job; and in non-mission critical systems within the enterprise. For example, this is often how open source was adopted. The picture is complicated by libraries and tool-chains that can make an established language (c, java, python) a…

Since this is now the third time that the blog post is posted on HN, I think it is as good a time as any to ask a few additional and deepening questions about this topic. For example, do bloggers and those who promote them also have some responsibility in the stated outcome? Does the quote "στέργει γὰρ οὐδεὶς ἄγγελον κακῶν ἐπῶν" not originate from the same play that tells us: "οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν", and should we not…