how to learn prolog?

v_krishna@lemmy.ml to Programming@programming.dev – 20 points –

Any recommendations for learning (modern) prolog? Specifically looking at ishigo/prolog and trealla-go as a way to embed rules validation engines in a golang application. Am I insane? If not (or so) how do I best go about learning prolog?

6

The way I managed to get an intuition about the language is just building classic boardgames. Checkers, chess, diplomacy and go are great exercise to start working with lists and dimensions, declaring multiple predicates and have them interact with each other. Changing the state of the program and using the traces to branch out decisions. Remember to keep track of your interpreter. Different interpreters act in surprising ways. The order of operations of SWI is different than Tau.

After that, the honest truth is that Prolog isn't widely used enough to have a 'modern standard approach'. The best way is to treat it like any other embedded subsystem: light and concise scripts embedded in a grown-up language.

Thanks that's helpful and maps to how I'm thinking it might be useful

I thought Erlang superceded it?

No, Erlang has a completely different paradigm than Prolog, it just looks superficially similar because the people who created Erlang liked Prolog's syntax so that's what they used as the basis for Erlang instead of the more standard ALGOL-derived syntax that most of us are used to.

Thanks this matches my understanding too (erlang is all about actor model is my understanding, similar to akka)