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Who Killed Prolog

29 August 2011

Via HackerNews comes the article Who Killed Prolog. The article wonders why logic programming languages have fallen behind object-oriented, imperative and functional programming languages (my current favourite functional programming language F# has just entered the TIOBE programming languages top-20).

The hypothesis of the article is that when a Japanse research project called the fifth generation computer system was ended, Prolog, it’s main programming language went down with it.

This reminded me of my undergraduate class in declarative languages in 2003. It started with our professor saying that there is a big cover up in the computer industry: “NASA, Microsoft, Google, HP and many other companies are using Prolog in their core products but they don’t want to admit it.” Instant classic!