Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
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From: alf@sics.se (Thomas Sj|land)
Subject: Re: Why hasn't Prolog Taken over the World?
In-Reply-To: amzi@world.std.com's message of Sat, 19 Nov 1994 17:02:18 GMT
Message-ID: <ALF.94Nov20171132@anhur.sics.se>
Sender: news@sics.se
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
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Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 16:11:32 GMT
Lines: 41

>But, Prolog is an ideal tool as a component of a larger application 
>(written in C, Basic or Cobol).  Then, you can use Prolog for the things 
>it does best: search, pattern matching, multiple constraints, etc. and 
>use C/Basic for the rest of the application.  Used in this way Prolog 
>becomes like any other database, graphics or other library/API.  It is a 
>service for the main application to call upon when advice, diagnosis or 
>other logic functions are needed.

My 2 cents: 
Logic programming environments, like those of other languages
developed in the 70s and 80s has in my opinion a serious problem
(apart from their often inherent single-threadedness): 

- It is often difficult to write small programs that load quickly and
perform a simple task without interaction with a "top level".  More
efforts must be put into interoperability and GUI-integration so that
small handlers for various tasks are at least as natural to write in a
logic programming language as in C/C++ or BASIC. It would be nice if all
different dialects adopted similar abstractions for these aspects, of
course.

There is also a need for more "success applications", i.e. programs (partly)
written in Prolog, that perform tasks that are accepted as important by
the majority of developers who couldn't care less for theoretical elegance.
The example mentioned sounds like an interesting one.

Apart from this, access to a good development system at a reasonable price
is crucial. You must be able to write programs that can be distributed
without requiring licences for the full development environment.

--
(Alf) Thomas Sjoeland
Internet e-mail: alf@sics.se
Snailmail:  SICS, PO Box 1263, S-164 28 KISTA, SWEDEN
Tel: +46 8 752 15 42  Fax: +46 8 751 72 30  Tel home: +46 8 80 44 08
URL:        http://www.sics.se/people/thomas-sjoland.html
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