Still, I think more Perl children should learn logic programming and so I toss out candy to lure 'em in.
I've heard this statement and other similar statements any number of other times, but I'm afraid I've yet to fully grasp the reasoning behind them, so I was wondering if I might impose upon your good nature and inquire as to exactly why you feel people should learn Logic Programming in general (and prolog in specific?)? Is it just a general notion that the more paradigms we're exposed to, the more options you have when devising solutions? Is there perchance a specific example of a "real world" (for some value of real, obviously) problem that is vastly easier to solve in prolog and you could present here, hopefully with contrasting examples from multiple languages?
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It's like Eastern Philosophy versus Western Philosophy. Both are correct, both are wrong, and yet, you understand the world in a completely different way when you are comfortable with the tenets of more than one.
In imperative programming, you instruct the computer what to DO. You have created a player-piano roll, and the player-piano will render the song.
In logical programming, you instruct the computer about the known facts, and about the rules which govern the implications of unknown facts. You ask such a system a question, and the computer will scan through all of the facts and rules, recursing as necessary, until it has an answer (or it finds it impossible to solve).
If you've written a Makefile, you have used a little bit of logical programming. You specify the rules for what files depend on others, and how to build them. The facts are not specified in the Makefile but are specified by the timestamps on the files themselves. The make program simply uses the facts and the rules to prove it can get to a point where the specified target is the newest file.
However, saying that make is like Prolog is akin to saying that $a || $b is "lazy evaluation" (as was discussed here last week). It's a very very limited example, compared to the actual benefits of the methods.
This site is religiously themed. If you're a Catholic, I urge you to visit a synagogue, a mosque and a buddhist temple. Visit each one until you see what is of value, and you see what is merely the trappings of an old tradition. Go back to your own church, and you'll more easily spot the catechisms which are Catholic, except by rote. The same goes for anyone of any faith or church, by the way.
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BUU asked:
... I was wondering if I might impose upon your good nature and inquire as to exactly why you feel people should learn Logic Programming in general (and prolog in specific?)? Is it just a general notion that the more paradigms we're exposed to, the more options you have when devising solutions?
First: the reason I'm using Prolog for this is because I don't know Mercury, Gödel, or any other language that supports logic programming. However, since Prolog is far and away the most popular, I wasn't too worried about this. In other words, I think logic programming is important; the fact that I'm using Prolog is almost accidental. It also doesn't hurt that Prolog is very easy to parse.
Now, on to the benefits!
Do you ever use regular expressions? They're a simple form of logic programming. Of course, there's nothing in regexes that I really can't do with substr and a lot of imperative programming, but that would be silly if I have regular expressions at my disposal.
Larry Wall also has some interesting things to say about logic programming (emphasis mine):
Transactions are not just something that database programmers have to worry about. I think training in transactional thinking tends to fall through the paradigmatic cracks because transactions can't be classified as functions or events or objects. If anything, a transaction is most closely related to the logic programming paradigm, which is undertaught. A transaction can be viewed as a sort of hypothesis that can either be proven or disproven. A partially proven hypothesis is of little use.
Logic programming is also used quite extensively in expert systems, natural language processing and artificial intelligence because it makes so many of the ideas contained in them very easy to express.
Further, and this is a big plus, well-written prolog Programs can be as close to "programming from the spec" as you can get. For example, here's a little snippet derived from the famous "Clocksin/Mellish" programming text. Can you guess what we're defining?
average_taxpayer(Person) :-
not(foreigner(Person)),
not(
spouse(Person, Spouse),
gross_income(Spouse, Income1),
Income > 3000
),
gross_income(Person, Income2), ...
That should not be terribly hard to figure out. If you have a program that needs to determine if someone is an "average" taxpayer, that's it. You would have a database with facts containing people's gross incomes or who is married to whom, but Prolog is often that straightforward.
The key in the snippet above is that the various bits express relationships between things. If your program is mostly concerned with how a bunch of things are related to one another, logic programming is an excellent choice, but like regular expressions or closures, the utility is often not very apparent until one actually has a chance to use it. In that respect, it's like a foreign country: you can read about it all you want, but until you live there, it's tough to appreciate its culture.
Update: In the type of programming that most Perl programmers do, we have our data and we keep munging that data until it eventually looks like our goal. In logic programming, we tell the computer what our goal looks like and we let the computer figure out how to get there. Is that straightforward enough? :)
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What you say makes sense, as usual =], but I'm afraid I'm still having trouble thinking of specific examples where it would be better. You mention several fields such as AI and so forth, but the example you gave doesn't seem like that much of a win over an imperative language, unless I'm drastically missunderstanding it. Here is my interpretation of your prolog:
sub is_average {
my $self = shift;
if( not $self->foreigner and not $self->spouse and $self->income > 3
+000 )
{
return 1;
}
}
Although I'm not sure where Income2 really enters in to it, perhaps my $self->income should return a list of incomes, but that's a minor detail, yes? | [reply]
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