Re: mainstreaming Prolog

From: Paul Singleton (paul.singleton_at_bcs.org.uk)
Date: 03/15/04 

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 18:19:41 +0000

anders t wrote:

> Is there a true interest among Prolog theoreticists and practitioners to
> popularize Prolog and perhaps make it a mainstream language, like Java,
> C++, C#,

There's no consensus on how to "mainstream" Prolog, and
no evidence that Prologists would devote significant effort
to a common path rather than pursuing individual interests
which tend to fragment, rather than strengthen, Prolog as
a whole.

I find the Prolog FAQ depressing, with its list of proprietary
and idiosyncratic implementations and extensions of Prolog,
many of them dormant or defunct, with no viable way of
combining their innovations. Indeed I doubt that any of them
were developed with much regard to this: Prolog is currently
much less than the sum of its parts.

Sadly, most of the creative Prologists are associated with
exactly one (or other) of these implementations; perhaps
we need some other focus, e.g. a neutral working group to
develop APIs for embedding Prolog in other languages, in
IDEs, in web app servers etc. Any nominations?

If we look at what has made RDBMSs so widely used and usable,
a lot of it is not very sexy or theoretical, but mundane
and necessary stuff for transactions, recovery, APIs for
programmatic use etc, and it's not surprising that few want
to contribute such work to Prolog while there is neither
consensus on how this sort of stuff should be structured,
nor even consensus on it being worth having at all.

Nevertheless, I haven't quite given up hope :-)

Paul Singleton

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