[kmicinski]

No offense, but I wouldn't take Datalog 2.0's small attendance as an exemplar of Datalog's decline, even if I agree with that high-level point. Datalog 2.0 is a satellite workshop of LPNMR, a relatively-unknown European conference that was randomly held in Dallas. I myself attended Datalog 2.0 and also felt the event felt relatively sparse. I also had a paper (not my primary work, the first author is the real wizard of course :-) at the workshop. I myself saw relatively few folks in that space even attending that event--with the notable exception of some European folks (e.g., introducing the Nemo solver).

All of this is to say, I think Datalog 2.0's sparse attendance this year may be more indicative of the fact that it is a satellite workshop of an already-lesser-prestigious conference (itself not even the main event! That was ICLP!) rather than a lack of Datalog implementation excitement.

For what it's worth, none of what I'm saying is meant to rebut your high-level point that there is little novelty left in implementing raw Datalog engines. Of course I agree, the research space has moved far beyond that (arguably it did a while ago) and into more exotic problems involving things like streaming (HydroFlow), choice (Dusa), things that get closer to the general chase (e.g., Egglog's chase engine), etc. I don't think anyone disagrees that vanilla Datalog is boring, it's just that monotonic, chain-forward saturation (Horn clauses!) are a rich baseline with a well-understood engineering landscape (esp in the high-performance space) to build out more interesting theories (semirings, Z-sets, etc..).

[BartjeD]

The USA is a hostile environment to visit, for Europeans. It's a theme all over western and northern Europe to avoid it.

If you were expecting European attendance, that would explain why it's different from the past.

It's the same in science circles, tourism and even business travel.

[freilanzer]

As a European, I'm definitely avoiding the US. I was asked whether I wanted to visit our US branch and I declined - which was simply accepted and probably expected in advance. Almost everyone I know does the same.

[kmicinski]

I completely agree with you, but this event was held in October, 2024--Trump's horrendous behavior wasn't an effect on that. There are other reasons folks internationally probably don't want to travel to Texas aside from Trump--but in this specific case I think it might have more to do with the fact that LPMNR is a traditionally European conference randomly held in the US.