this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Old enough they still know Prolog.

[–] marcos 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And before the time people actually talked about the multidimensional clusterfuck that C become.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, to be honest C is still C, but it's children have run mad.

[–] marcos 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

C changed from the 90's to now. It got a lot of syntactic improvements, and a ton of semantic madness.

Our C is not the same as the last generation's.

[–] uis 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] marcos 1 points 1 year ago

It doesn't change the madness. Just the syntax.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not as common any more, but there's still things using logic programming languages (Prolog and similar) even today.

Java uses it in the type checker. From the JVM spec:

The type checker enforces type rules that are specified by means of Prolog clauses.

There's some other compiler and NLP (natural language processing) use cases for it too. I've seen some companies use it to define restraints for their business logic, which isn't too different from the type checker rules use case.

It's definitely fallen out of common use though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We did Prolog in university - actually it was one of the two languages we had to learn in CS, the other one being Pascal.

I always considered Prolog a pain in the ass and unsuitable for anything bigger than a piece of homework due to the "we don't do loops, we have tail recursion" making the code unnecessary complex and hard to read. On a list of Write-Only languages I'd rate it a few steps below Perl.

[–] uis 3 points 1 year ago

Tail recursion is just fancy way to loop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a few things it's very good at, but anything outside of that tends to be painful.

I also used Pascal and Prolog in university, in my first year. That was... 15 years ago now. Wow.

[–] DepressedCoconut 1 points 1 year ago

I'm using Prolog in university right now. And Scala :(