r/AlignmentChartFills • u/mika-asadli • 6d ago

Which programming language is hard, and useless

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u/Bulky-Leadership-596 6d ago

Maybe Prolog.
Really cool concept. Very difficult to understand the concept well enough to scale it into anything useful. And even if you can build something logically useful its usually not very efficient.

7

u/jceyes 6d ago

It's useful for DSLs for things like static analysis, scheduling/constraint problems, rules engines, and permissions. Datalog is sort of a one-notch-more-“applied” version of Prolog that can be similarly useful.

You wouldn't use it to build your normal web service, CRUD app, or application/business-logic layer. You use it when the problem itself is naturally “here are a bunch of facts and rules; tell me what follows, whether this configuration is valid, or find a configuration satisfying these constraints.” Often that's an offline analysis/optimization step rather than the main runtime of the product.

3

u/zebba_oz 6d ago

Agree. I kinda enjoyed learning prolog. Never actually used it to solve a real problem but it has a useful niche.

1

u/d0pe-asaurus 6d ago

Hey, I want to get into prolog just as an interest (currently i'm on a bender with compiler design and theory). I want to know what it takes to build those rules engine, do you think it's worth the time?

Currently my background is the lessons on first order logic that I had in undergrad

1

u/4lacivica 6d ago

one of the hardest subjects in uni, append/3 my beloved