Prolog

I started as a research assistant.

I worked with Prolog and learned about Prolog.

But basically, this is the thing which I'm interested in mainly is declarative programming in general.

So I started with Prolog because my boss had to ask me, so please install here.

You have a big tape.

Please install.

This is a C Prolog system from Edinburgh.

And then I wanted to know what is it.

In some sense, when people say, I don't care how it's expressed, you actually do.

If I told you to write that same algorithm in Prolog, you would actually care deeply about how it's expressed.

What you mean by I don't care how it's expressed is, I've got this medium that we've never really sat down and voted on, but we've just decided on.

It's not quite the Turing machine either.

I think we spend too much time in PL worrying about, like, preventing things and not enough time about, like, enabling things, right? I like to give...

You know, I like to demo in class.

I do demos of, like, you know, Father Time or of, like, Prolog.

And, like, there's the student...

I was hired, my friend Frank Yellen was hired at the same time because we both knew how to do advanced language runtime systems.

He came from Lucid and CommonLisp, and I came from Quintus and Prolog, and we both were hired at the same time, specifically because the first-person team needed some people who knew how to do runtime multi-threaded stuff or garbage-collected stuff or high-performance virtual machine bytecode interpreters, that kind of business, which was the That's the coin of the realm at this point.

Now, this is a long way of saying that the actual, what we inherited at that point was kind of a mess.

There is this classic sequence of what are the values of Java and things, object-oriented, multi-threaded, all these sorts of things.

That would have been really nice.

But they also did have some programming languages that are very tightly tied with AI like Lisp and Prolog.

So I don't know how many people actually have the urge to go fire up their web browser and write some Lisp in their browser.

But, you know, if you do...

I did calculus, statistics, programming in many different languages.

I think the most exoteric one is like Prolog, if you think about it.

But anyways- I use Prolog.

It's so good for AI.

First experience with AI, quote unquote.

Everyone listening to this is going to be like, if you're too young, you're not going to know what Prologue is.

It's so funny.

But anyways, I think we connected about this before.

Declarative programming is you know the end state.

Which is this Prolog-y kind of thing-

Yeah

... which people thought was horrible.

I

can still use Prolog too because it now supports audiobook server, but there's also an audiobooks app, I think, that connects to the audiobook server.

Anyhow, we're going to do that thing.

And we're going to run Plex and some more stuff on there and some Docker stuff.