🚀 go-pugleaf

I strongly disagree with a recent news posting from
Daniel Cohen              Department of Computer Science 
Email: dc@dcs.qmw.ac.uk   Queen Mary and Westfield College
Tel: +44 71 975 5245/4/9  Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK
Fax: +44 81 980 6533      ******* Hit the North!!! *******

He said the following concerning entries in the Prolog 1000

> I was a bit baffled to find entries like PARLOG and STRAND-88 in your
> excellent list. The STRAND-88 system, for example, is not written in
> Prolog (although large parts of the system are written in Strand, which
> is a logic programming language). More importantly, I would have to
> classify the system as a programming language implementation and not as
> an application; if STRAND-88 qualifies then surely so do all Prolog
> implementations (most of which will have at least some part written in
> Prolog).
> 
> While I applaud the objectives and results of the survey I suspect we'd
> be better off restricting it to applications other than those which
> are implementations of logic programming systems or subsystems. In
> particular, I suggest excluding:
> 
> 	logic programming language implementations and libraries;
> 	CASE tools for logic programmers;
> 	development systems for logic programming;
> 	etc.
> 
> I realise that these are all bona fide applications from the
> programmer's point of view, but consider the purpose of the database:
> it's to help convince sceptics that Prolog has a good track record in
> application development, not that it's a good language for writing
> other versions of the language in! If I were such a sceptic, flicking
> through the list to see what applications had been done in Prolog in my
> area of, say, armchair testing, my suspicions would be immediately
> aroused by the sight of such "applications" - it would heighten the
> perception that Prolog is the sort of language that's only used by
> people doing research into Prolog.

At the Second International Conference on Logic Programming in
Uppsala, Sweden, in 1984, Alan Perlis was the banquet speaker. His
topic was 'What is the Future of Prolog?' It was a wonderfully
entertaining speech. The 'serious' message, delivered humorously of
course, was that Prolog would only survive if it spawned 'an industry'
of applications for which it was indispensable. What better place to
start than self-serving applications such as programming tools, which
is what happened with Lisp, and more general in bureaucracy.

I agree with Perlis' observations. Prolog being successfully useful for
its own needs is its own best advertisement. Furthermore, the lack of
development environments for logic programming is probably the major
reason it is not widely used. Conversely, someone recently told me a
significant factor underlying his use of Prolog as a language for
prototypes was the Quintus Prolog library because it was much more
useful than Ada generic packages!! This is knowledge insufficiently
known.

So all Prolog vendors and sotware companies please send in your
language tools written in Prolog for the Prolog 1000. 

				Leon Sterling