Why is this getting upvotes? Are some people voting before actually reading the content? The formatting of the text and the content are very poor and the points are not justified at all.
"Prolog is cool because you can write stuff is a spreadsheet, then export it to CSV and then use some regexp to convert that to actual prolog code." Seriously? Who would do that?
"Forget data structures and algorithms you don't need that." This paragraph starts with "You don't need to know recursion". Prolog. No need to know recursion. Prolog. Okay dude, sure.
Last but not least, I don't think someone saying that Prolog code is naturaly concise and elegant because it's like writing SQL queries knows what he's talking about at all.
I think what Prolog, SQL, Lisp, or even J really offer is cheap exploratory development.
I am tremendously productive sitting in front of a REPL with access to data. Even with my Ruby hacking, I tend to be playing with 1 to 4 lines of code in irb while building my scripts and tools.
I have not had the opportunity to build a big production system with any of these languages though. I wonder if some of the reason the OO enterprise languages work and hang on is that they facilitate understanding and communication between developers.
I hate the amount of boilerplate code that seems to wrap around code examples I see in Java and C# sometimes. I was looking at a tutorial just yesterday that boiled down to declare an array of values, use a matrix of these other values, and apply these functions to the matrix until convergence occurs.
The amount of jumping I was doing between different Java class files and static functions was completely an impediment to the point of the tutorial, which was to demonstrate the logic of the process. OTOH, I was able to jump around and follow the points. But I really think it could have been more aptly demonstrated in a few lines of code in another language.
Thinking of this interview with Arthur Whitney and this topic:
"BC To ask a slightly broader question, what is the con-
nection between computer language and thought? To
what degree does our choice of how we express software
change the way we think about the problem?
AW I think it does a lot. That was the point of Ken
Iverson’s Turing Award paper, “Notation as a Tool of
Thought.” I did pure mathematics in school, but later I
was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in computer
algorithms. I could see that the professor was getting
killed by the notation. He was trying to express the idea
of different kinds of matrix inner products, saying if you
have a directed graph and you’re looking at connections,
then you write this triple nested loop in Fortran or Algol.
It took him an hour to express it. What he really wanted
to show was that for a connected graph it was an or-dot-
and. If it’s a graph of pipe capacities, then maybe it’s a
plus-dot-min. If he’d had APL or K as a notation, he could
have covered that in a few seconds or maybe a minute,
but because of the notation he couldn’t do it."
I can't fathom how a networking stack or GUI framework would be written in Prolog itself (assuming some basic primitive access to the machine were available to the interpreter). Everything besides logical inference and deduction would have to be written as foreign bindings. Whichever implementation of Prolog I've used had basic arithmetic in it.
This begs the question: why not go the other way and use Prolog as an embedded DSL in another language? Racklog and Datalog[1] demonstrate this is possible and rather useful. Then you have the benefits of Prolog inside another language which can do ... stuff.
And if I ever succeed, perhaps you could have Answer Set Prolog embedded in your code too and solve NP-complete search problems declaratively. But this isn't a plug.
That seemed to be mostly a rant about what you _don't_ do with Prolog, not about what you actually can do. The example of exporting a spreadsheet to CSV doesn't sound too convincing of the language's miraculous powers.
"Why prolog is by far the best, most productive, easiest programming language?"
Because you want to believe it. You can change 'prolog' to any other language and easily find people agreeing with you.
"Prolog is cool because you can write stuff is a spreadsheet, then export it to CSV and then use some regexp to convert that to actual prolog code." Seriously? Who would do that?
"Forget data structures and algorithms you don't need that." This paragraph starts with "You don't need to know recursion". Prolog. No need to know recursion. Prolog. Okay dude, sure.
Last but not least, I don't think someone saying that Prolog code is naturaly concise and elegant because it's like writing SQL queries knows what he's talking about at all.