PrologAndLisp

Why doesn't Prolog have the same cult following as Lisp?

Nov 16 https://www.quora.com//Why-doesnt-Prolog-have-the-same-cult-following-as-Lisp/answer/Phil-Jones-He-Him

It probably does have passionate fans.

Deservedly so.

But Prolog is a little bit less "practical" than even Lisp.

I don't mean less less "powerful" or "useful"

It's massively powerful and useful.

But it's harder to slot into your normal practice and most contexts we program in today.

Even more than Lisp, Prolog is a language that makes many hard things easy, but some easy things hard.

At various times Lisp has found practical niches for scripting or other applications.

Prolog's niches are even more specialized and obscure.

So I suspect the community of people with Prolog knowledge is smaller to begin with. And the cult is smaller.

But I think the ideas of Prolog are incredibly powerful and relevant. In the last decade we've seen both Clojure (a new reinvention of Lisp) and Pharo (not quite a reinvention of Smalltalk, but with Glamorous Toolkit a quite radical and exciting new thing) both gain followers and reignite excitement in these traditions.

I'm waiting for someone to do the same with Prolog. SWI is remarkably good. (It's surprisingly easy to set up a web-server as UI to your application) But I suspect SWI is going to be to Prolog what Racket is to Lisp. A powerful but niche continuity product.

So I'm waiting for someone to do to Prolog what Clojure does with Lisp : break it sufficiently to fit into the contemporary world of software development, but keep 90% of the good stuff.

And it could be incredible.

Also :

Phil Jones (He / Him)\'s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?

Phil Jones (He / Him)\'s answer to Why is logic programming overlooked? Can we use it for developing any kind of software?

Phil Jones (He / Him)\'s answer to What is the programming language you are looking for and why?

Quora Answer : What is the difference between lisp and prolog?

Nov 16

Panicz Godek has a fantastic answer highlighting the similarity of Lisp and Prolog : Panicz Godek's answer to Can you explain to non-coders the most impressive code you've seen?

Basically if you read that you'll see what changes you'll need to make to Lisp to make it into a kind of Prolog.