"Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks

Not only is it worthwhile to learn, it's worthwhile to use for real world problems: [VIDEO] From his blog: [LINK]

I found a page from 1994(!) asking the same question: [LINK] Given that Prolog isn't super-widely used (compared to say, C++), there are going to be a limited number of developers with Prolog expertise. That means companies who use it in their tech stack are generally going to have to hire developers who fit the other qualifications for the role then put them through some internal Prolog training. The listings for such positions probably won't have Prolog as a "required" skill but a "desired" skill. One other point -- just because there aren't any/many jobs where Prolog is required doesn't mean there aren't many cases where Prolog could be useful. Prolog hasn't been widely taught for a couple of decades, so a significant proportion of developers today won't recognize a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for as a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for. There's a Strange Loop 2014 talk on YouTube, "Production Prolog", that might give ideas about jobs that use (or could use) Prolog: [VIDEO]

You might be interested in these SO answers regarding "Real world Prolog Usage": [LINK] The answers are replete with claims about good use-cases for Prolog. Michael Hendricks' talk at last year's Strange Loop on "Production Prolog" gives an excellent high-level survey of the uses, advantages, and drawbacks of Prolog: [VIDEO] BTW, I have played a tiny bit with Flora2 myself. It seemed really neat. If you're interested in the intersection of OO and Prolog, you may also want to look at Logtalk[0]. FWIW, if I understand your meaning correctly, it is very easy to "pass rules as parameters to other rules" in vanilla Prolog. It facilitates all sorts of higher-order approaches and is very good for meta-programming. [0]: [LINK]

Same here, I don't think this is a particularly great way of starting with Prolog. I have found these videos helpful for understanding Prolog: [LINK] [VIDEO]

Yes. I'd love to know more about real world use cases. Edit: Found some relevant threads and links: [LINK] [VIDEO]

> Hmm I'm fine with prolog, I love it, but I'm not sure how it can be used in practice. Well, that rings similar to what is said about Lisp sometimes, and I think it can easily be refuted by pointing to instances where it is being used in practice[0]. There are some problems that are fairly easy to solve in Prolog, but would be very difficult to express in SQL[1]. And recursive relations, which are at the core of Prolog, only made their way into SQLite 4 years ago[2]. My comment was specifically about those Prolog/Datalog implementations in Racket . Other Prolog implementations might be dealing sensibly with incremental updates (but I don't know). > Having seen companies where SQL was used very extensively for analytics, data storage etc I can't see how prolog wouldn't help. You can't see how Prolog wouldn't help, as in Prolog can only be an improvement over SQL? [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]

For an awesome video showcasing a bit of the real power of Prolog, you need to check (if you haven't already) this Strangeloop talk: "Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks [VIDEO]

Prolog also has some really impressive debugging tools. It allows you to pause execution, change the code, and then resume execution from an earlier point in time . Michael Hendrick's "Production Prolog" talk gives a demo of this (at 12:17) [VIDEO]

I recommend starting with [0] to get a feel for what's possible. [1] is great when you have time to dive deeper. [2] is good motivation, and [3] will show you how to build a practical roles & permissions system. Keep in mind that you don't have to build your app in 100% prolog to use prolog. There are likely implementations in your favorite language. For example, Rust[a] JavaScript[b], and Ruby[c]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [a] [LINK] [b] [LINK] [c] [LINK]

Check out "Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks on YouTube, which demonstrates the same thing, at a talk at StrangeLoop: [VIDEO]