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A Tour of Prolog

The Power of Prolog
Tutorials
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this tutorial2 months2022–2024 score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends it as the best short introduction to what makes Prolog unique.

Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting. It also covers concise meta-interpreters.

“check out this video introduction by Markus Triska about what makes Prolog unique” (HN, 2023)

1 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 1 citations · Tutorials · intro

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@ggzor Dec 2022 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Prolog at Work
The Power of Prolog [0] is a fantastic blog/video series covering everything from basic syntax, theoretical basis, modern features and idiomatic constructs. I highly recommend it if you want to get the gist of Prolog and its modern features. If you want a tour of Prolog, you can watch the video with the same name [1]. [0]: [link] [1]: [this video]
Tour of Prolog's syntax, theory and modern features
@grose Apr 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)
Read more
I think that Prolog will rise again. If you have an hour to kill, check out this video introduction by Markus Triska about what makes Prolog unique: [this video] Recently I have been working on getting Trealla Prolog to run in WebAssembly. Support is quite good now, with an easy-to-use JS library[1], Go library[2], and is now one of the best-supported languages for the Spin runtime[3]. I think it's particularly nice for validations, you can write some simple Prolog rules and run the same code on the client and the server now. I would like to explore this more with a dedicated library at some point. Built-in features like DCGs make parsing/generating all kinds of data trivial. I love it. I think the biggest barrier to Prolog adoption is that it has a really steep learning curve, and most people get burnt by half-assed introductions in college that tick the 'talked about logic programming' box in the syllabus. You really have to think in a completely different way to write a good Prolog program. But, once you get the right mindset, it makes solving complex problems incredibly easy. I don't really buy the argument that Datalog is enough. Most Datalog implementations I've seen hack on a bunch of extensions to do things like list membership. It would be awesome to see some serious effort put into an efficient Prolog-based database. The closest thing I can think of is TerminusDB, which I've never used but I wish I could convince my company to try it out ;). My dream is to have some kind
Intro to what makes Prolog unique

Citations, criticism and jokes

@rdtsc Oct 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning
I was watching some of the videos and in the intro Markus mentioned some of the most popular Prolog systems [this video] SICStus, GNU Prolog, XSB, Ciao, Scryer, Traella, Tau but does not mention at all of SWI-Prolog. I remember using SWI-Prolog back in the day, did it somehow fall out favor, or is there some animosity between implementation and Markus is just not in the SWI-Prolog camp?

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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