Posts Tagged ‘Prolog’

Prolog promptI am tackling a third language from the book today. This is Prolog and we are not complete strangers. I remember using it at uni for some lab practices and I can remember we didn’t get along like a house on fire. I found Prolog strange and at odds with imperative mindset I held back then. Now that I am a bit older, I find the fact that language is a bit different appealing and intriguing and I look forward to see why was it designed in such manner and what benefits it’s approach brings.

Day 1 explains the very basic concepts behind the language. It explains its syntax which is very simple. Main constructs are atoms, variables, facts and rules.

%atoms
me.
brother.
mother.
granddad.

%facts
parent(me, mother).
parent(brother, mother).
parent(mother, granddad).

%rules
grandparent(X, Y) :- parent(X, Z), parent(Z, Y).
sibling(X, Y) :- \+(X = Y), parent(X, Z), parent(Y, Z).
% X, Y and Z are variables

No syntax highlighting is available – I guess that the “hip crowd” does not grok Prolog. Read on »

Book Cover: Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. TateLately I have a feeling that Java ecosystem is getting a bit stale. To add to that grass seemed greener on the other side of the fence. Several of my friends that I started my coding career with in J2EE trenches have deserted and moved on to Ruby. None of them ever mentioned regretting the move.

Then new languages that run on JVM started gaining traction and I had a little play with Groovy couple of years ago. I liked the language very much and I grokked why my friends were so happy with Ruby path they’ve chosen. Sheer expressiveness and productivity provided were impressive. I tried to push for Groovy to be used at work but it never got beyond utilities and scripts. I once read that someone said that the problem Groovy has, is that it is not called Business Logic Expression Language. It seems that sentiment rings quite true.

Anyway as I mentioned earlier Java no longer feels quite like a nice new comfy shirt. I am feeling that it’s constraining me and due to my brushes with alternative, there is always that little question in the back of my head: “Am I using the proverbial golden hammer?”

Recently I started looking over the fence again and I am seeing that there seems to be more choice than ever. One of the languages that sparked my interest was Scala. I checked out some of the websites devoted to it and found that community seems quite vibrant and that the language itself is very interesting indeed. Also the fact that it allows and encourages functional programming sparked my interest even further. I am quite familiar with object orientation and have merely brushed with functional programming at uni. The prospect of getting my head around something new and the promises that functional programming paradigm brings (especially regarding concurrency) got me quite excited.

As I almost decided to devote more time to Scala I have attended Agile Testing & BDD eXchange. In one of the presentations Erik Stenman talked about Erlang amongst other things and caught my attention. Read on »