Prolog Coding Horror

RohanAdwankar 90 points 29 comments May 17, 2026
www.metalevel.at · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

crustycoder

Mostly overblown.

appil

What do people use Prolog for in the real world? I learned about it on a university course and it seems so esoteric compared to other things on the course. Like something invented just for computer scientists to enjoy.

rtpg

There's something quite illuminating with this first "horror", where they basically say "it's OK to report wrong answers, because you can check the answers". I don't think I've ever felt like it's OK for my program to provide a list of answers where some are right and some are wrong, but reading this... and generally believing in P != NP.... maybe that's a decent way of looking at some stuff!

mmastrac

If you want to understand prolog, you must understand the four-port model: https://grack.com/writing/school/enel553/report/prolog.html

schmuhblaster

As someone who has developed a somewhat weird obsession with Prolog, I can highly recommend Markus Triska's other articles on Prolog. His article on meta-interpreters [0] was particularly inspiring for me. [0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/prolog_misc/acomip....

txhwind

now we may have a more powerful "Prolog" - LLM Agent, though not precise and correct somtimes.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
8,303 stories · 78,303 chunks indexed