[schmuhblaster]

I also have a strange obsession with Prolog and Markus Triska's article on meta-interpreters heavily inspired me to write a Prolog-based agent framework with a meta-interpreter at its core [0].

I have to admit that writing Prolog sometimes makes me want to bash my my head against the wall, but sometimes the resulting code has a particular kind of beauty that's hard to explain. Anyways, Opus 4.5 is really good at Prolog, so my head feels much better now :-)

[0] http://github.com/deepclause/deepclause-desktop

[kamaal]

>>I have to admit that writing Prolog sometimes makes me want to bash my my head against the wall

I think much of the frustration with older tech like this comes from the fact that these things were mostly written(and rewritten till perfection) on paper first and only the near-end program was input into a computer with a keyboard.

Modern ways of carving out a program with 'Successive Approximations' with a keyboard and monitor until you get to something to work is mostly a recent phenomenon. Most of us are used to working like this. Which quite honestly is mostly trial and error. The frustration is understandable because you are basically throwing darts, most of the times in the dark.

I knew a programmer from the 1980s who(built medical electronics equipment) would tell me how even writing C worked back then. It was mostly writing a lot, on paper. You had to prove things on paper first.

[schmuhblaster]

>> I think much of the frustration with older tech like this comes from the fact that these things were mostly written(and rewritten till perfection) on paper first and only the near-end program was input into a computer with a keyboard.

I very much agree with this, especially since Prolog's execution model doesn't seem to go that well with the "successive approximations" method.

[qohen]

...these things were mostly written(and rewritten till perfection) on paper first and only the near-end program was input into a computer with a keyboard.

Not if you were working in a high-level language with an interpreter, REPL, etc. where you could write small units of code that were easily testable and then integrated into the larger whole.

As with Lisp.

And Prolog.

[bjourne]

But I wonder if that characterization is actually flattering for Prolog? I can't think of any situation, skill, technology, paradigm, or production process for which "doing it right the first time" beats iterative refinement.

[pixl97]

I'm assuming they were written on paper because they were commonly punched into paper at some stage after that. We tend to be more careful with non erasable media.

[tannhaeuser]

> Opus 4.5 is really good at Prolog

Anything you'd like to share? I did some research within the realm of classic robotic-like planning ([1]) and the results were impressive with local LLMs already a year ago, to the point that obtaining textual descriptions for complex enough problems became the bottleneck, suggesting that prompting is of limited use when you could describe the problem in Prolog concisely and directly already, given Prolog's NLP roots and one-to-one mapping of simple English sentences. Hence that report isn't updated to GLM 4.7, Claude whatever, or other "frontier" models yet.

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html

[schmuhblaster]

Opus 4.5 helped me implement a basic coding agent in a DSL built on top of Prolog: https://deepclause.substack.com/p/implementing-a-vibed-llm-c.... It worked surprisingly well. With a bit of context it was able to (almost) one-shot about 500 lines of code. With older models, I felt that they "never really got it".