[SIGCIS-Members] History of Prolog

[Magnus Boman]

I took my first Prolog course in the summer of 1984 and got hooked
immediately. In the late 80s, the Japanese state gave 12 years of generous
funding to SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science - until its
disappearance in 2018 the largest computer science research institute in
Sweden for >30 years - to "develop 5th generation programming languages."
This led to many things, including SICStus Prolog, which still has many
active users and is in the top10 of most thanked code libraries in
published research: https://sicstus.sics.se/

Some of the people still developing solvers for Prolog are among the best
programmers I have had the pleasure to work with. I worked at SICS for 18
years and wrote many meta-interpreters for Prolog myself, but I did not
commit any new constraint solvers to the core of SICStus. A story typical
of early 90s Prolog development is me asking one of my mentors, Torkel
Franzén, whom some of you would remember from the Usenet days, why he did
not promote his latest solver, was it no good? (I used it in my course on
automated theorem proving and it rocked.) Well, he said, it's the fastest
prover in the world, by far. But it's for intuitionistic logic. Thus, it
has no merit. Torkel and I taught a string of Ph D courses in the 90s,
including Foundations of Logic Programming, based on the wonderful book by
Lloyd. Torkel said to the students that if you can't find a 1st ed, just
buy a later edition and rip out the added chapters.

We had lots of fun in particular with not(not(not( constructions, i.e.
negated negation-as-failure clauses...
M.

On Wed, 30 Mar 2022 at 18:30, McMillan, William W <william.mcmillan at cuaa.edu>
wrote:

> Pierre, you mention the use of Prolog in Japan, but IBM was also quite
> interested in it during the 1980s (I believe in the U.S.).  They had a
> recruiting table set up at the 1984 ACM Computer Science Conference just to
> recruit Prolog developers.
>
> You're probably familiar with a Windows-based "Prolog" that was sold under
> the name Turbo Prolog (possibly from Borland).  I put Prolog in quotes
> because Turbo Prolog required compile-time variable-type binding, which is
> good for efficiency, but so inflexible for AI systems that it was useless.
>
> There were several other Prolog implementations, such as Arity Prolog,
> that were real Prolog, but that had their own extensions to support things
> like character-based windows for the UI (hot stuff in the 1980s).
>
> I may have docs or info on some of these other Prologs if anyone is
> interested.
>
> Personal note: Prolog is still the most powerful programming language ever
> developed.  I found that the number of lines of C or Java code to the
> number of lines of Prolog code to implement the same functionality
> (exclusive of the UI) was 10 to 100, depending on the complexity.  But good
> use of Prolog requires extensive rewiring of the programmer's brain to do
> anything but simple stuff.
>
> (OK, OK, APL fans, I'll admit you have the same advantage for numerical
> apps!)
>
> Bill
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Pierre
> Mounier-Kuhn <mounier at msh-paris.fr>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, March 30, 2022 7:58 AM
> *To:* members <members at sigcis.org>
> *Subject:* [SIGCIS-Members] History of Prolog
>
>
> *CAUTION:* This email originated from outside of Concordia University. Do
> not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and
> know the content is safe.
> Hi all,
> Prolog was a programming language based on formal logic, designed in 1972
> at the university of Marseille by Alain Colmerauer and his team. It was
> adopted ten years later in Japan to develop AI systems. Nowadays, it is
> almost as forgotten as Algol or APL. A conference is planned for November
> 2022 in Paris to pay hommage to Colmerauer and his work. A Colmerauer Prize
> Committee is formed, chaired by Prof. em. Robert Kowalski, Distinguished
> Research Fellow at Imperial College, London.
> I would like to know whether people, beyond Colmerauer's circle, have
> included Prolog, its development and use, in their historical research.
> Thanks for your answers!
> Best regards,
> Pierre Mounier-Kuhn
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