Comment by ramses0

My time to shine! https://eugeneasahara.com/2024/08/12/playing-with-prolog-pro...

...ie:

    # ya don't really care how this works
    prolog.consult("diabetes_risk.pl")

    # ...but you can query into it!
    query = "at_risk_for_diabetes(Person)"
    results = list(prolog.query(query))

...the point being there's sometimes some sort of "logic calculation that you wish could be some sort of regex", and I always think of prolog as "regexes for logic".

One time I wished I could use prolog was trying to figure the best match between video file, format, bitrate, browser, playback plugin... or if you've seen https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ ...being able to "just" encode all the constraints, and say something like:

   valid_config = consult("rules.pl")
      + consult("parts_data.pl")
      + python.choice_so_far(...)

   rules.pl: only_one_cpu, total_watts < power_supply(watts)
   parts_data.pl: cpu_xyz: ...; power_supply_abc: watts=1000
   choices: cpu(xyz), power_supply(abc), ...

...this is a terribly syntactically incorrect example, but you could imagine that this would be horrific code to maintain in python (and sqrt(horrific) to maintain in prolog), but _that's_ the benefit! You can take a well-defined portion and kindof sqrt(...) the maintenance cost, at the expense of 1.5x'ing the number of programming languages you need to expect people to know.