Comment by coliveira
3 months ago
Prolog is very powerful, if you see what professionals can do with it it's eye opening. Unfortunately, it takes a complete relearning of programming to achieve that proficiency level. And after you reach it, you probably cannot use it in your day job...
My problem with Prolog is every time I want to start using it I feel like I'm populating a database then doing queries on it. So it feels like SQL with another syntax and less power.
I'm sure I'm wrong and missing something but that's where I stop.
> I feel like I'm populating a database then doing queries on it. So it feels like SQL
I'm not sure what database technology/data storage that doesn't involve doing those two things to get started.
I haven't done any Prolog, but Datalog which is similar and focused on querying data, and the benefits of Datalog for me is that you can write complex/medium-complex queries a lot easier than in SQL, at least for me. Simpler queries are just less characters, but pretty much the same beyond that.
Probably helps that the Clojure ecosystem embraced Datalog so it mostly feels like writing Clojure code although it's really Datalog. You don't get that same feeling regardless of what SQL library/DSL you use.
Prolog is in fact a kind of database. However it is untrue that it has less power than SQL, just the opposite. Probably it feels harder to use because you're already so used to how SQL works.