The Birth of Prolog: A Personal Journey into Logic Programming
The Birth of Prolog (1996)
I recount the origins of Prolog, a groundbreaking logic programming language born from collaborative efforts in the 1970s. Drawing from my experiences, I explore how Prolog emerged as a tool for artificial intelligence, blending theoretical insights with practical applications. This story highlights the innovative spirit that shaped its development and its lasting impact on computer science.
Prolog was not just a language; it was a new way of thinking about computation itself.
- a9i
I discovered Prolog in my youth, and logic has been something of an addiction ever since - not always, I suspect, a particularly useful one.
Lately, though, I have found what may be an antidote in Emacs, Lisp, and functional programming.
Then again, perhaps I have merely traded one elegant addiction for another.
- froh
Prolog (and common lisp) were all the rage for NLP in the 1990s, HPSG systems, le dernier cri, were implemented in them.
what confused me back then and still does is the strict determinism, the fact that program code order defines the output, not the fastest to prove valid binding.
I hoped for sth that would instead be driven by sth like A* guided by probabilities, learned from corpora...
in the early 2000s I then saw research doing exactly that, a* guided search guiding the unification algorithm. I wonder what has become of these approaches. (didn't find the specific paper any more, which to me was one of these sacred moments of reading something hard and useful being well explained, if I find it I'll update. I _believe_ it was from Stanford)
- jrapdx3
Programming in Prolog back in the 1980s was a pleasant experience. I wrote some useful programs with Prolog but as I remember that era, the language made a brief splash and soon relegated to niche settings.
Nowadays I enjoy programming in Scheme, which I'd guess is chosen by developers about as often as Prolog. Using Scheme stirs up memories of my Prolog experience. Intuitively it seems like these PLs require or stimulate a similar thinking process that appeals to some of us. I haven't pursued this idea, but it lingers in my brain.
Curiously both PLs were developed in the early 1970s and first official versions released in 1975. Is it possible the authors of Scheme knew about and were influenced by Prolog? Not too likely, but Prolog's creators did spend some time at MIT, the birthplace of Scheme, so the odds are a bit better than 0.