[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.

[kamaal]

Before personal computer revolution, compute time and even development/test time on a large computers back then was rationed.

One can imagine how development would work in a ecosystem like that. You have to understand both the problem, and your solution, and you need to be sure it would work before you start typing it out at a terminal.

This the classic Donald Knuth workflow. Like he is away disconnected from a computer for long periods of time, focussed on the problems and solutions, and he is working them out on paper and pen. Until he has arrived solutions that just work, correctly. And well enough to be explained in a text book.

When you take this away. You also take away the need to put in hard work required to make things work correctly. Take a look at how many Java devs are out there who try to use a wrong data structure for the problem, and then try to shoe horn their solution to roughly fit the problem. Eventually solution does work for some acceptable inputs, and remainder is left to be discovered by an eventual production bug. Stackoverflow is full of such questions.

Languages like Prolog just don't offer that sort of freedom. And you have to be in some way serious about what you are doing in terms of truly understanding both the problem and solution well enough to make them work.

[qohen]

Languages like Prolog just don't offer that sort of freedom.

Yes, they do -- that's why people have enjoyed using such languages.

It might help to think of them as being like very-high-level scripting-languages with more rigorous semantics (e.g. homoiconicity) and some nifty built-ins, like Prolog's relational-database. (Not to mention REPLs, tooling, etc.)

Read, for example, what Paul Graham wrote about using Lisp for Viaweb (which became Yahoo Store) [0] and understand that much of what he says applies to languages like Prolog and Smalltalk too.

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html