Thank you for your interest. Recent scrutiny has shown that this essay is below the standard I aim at and needs to be repaired.
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Thank you for your interest. Recent scrutiny has shown that this essay is below the standard I aim at and needs to be repaired.
A Programmers Place 
June 16, 2008 at 11:57 am |
My beef with Senner’s book is that he also fails to acknowledge the seminal role of Logic Programming’s innovations as a term-rewriting system. As we know, it took years for the full power of the virtual machine to become entrenched in conventional sequential computers but with the advent of commodity parallel CPUs in the early 2000s, the importance of term-rewriting for parallel computation became evident well into the second decade of the 21st century. Innovations in automating the compilation parallel programs that had begun to bear fruit in the 1990’s with Parlog, Concurrent Constraint Logic Programming etc. (research that was arrested in it’s tracks because of the end of funding for the “5th Generation” computing project) found new life when the limitations Google’s MapReduce and other similar methods for distributed computing became apparent.
April 2, 2018 at 11:37 am |
Nice essay (like so many in this blog).
The review says ‘But if you would have whispered “Colmerauer” into the ear of an XML devotee, you would have met with a blank stare. Following it up with a heavy hint like “Prolog” wouldn’t change anything.’
It may depend on the XML devotee. I won’t speak for others in the working group, but if you had whispered “Colmerauer” in *my* ear, you would have been grabbed by the lapel and asked “Colmerauer? Alain Colmerauer? Why? Is he here? Do you know him? Wow! What’s he like? Can you introduce me? I want to touch the hem of his garment!”
(This assumes, of course, that when you whispered the name I understood what you were saying; this is not necessarily a given, the Francophone pronunciation of Germanic names being sometimes a little tricky for non-native speakers of French.)
I cannot say that any discussions in the XML working group turned on the relation of XML to logic programming, any more than on its relation to S-expressions. But some of us, at least, were aware of Prolog and its virtues, as some of us were aware of Lisp and its virtues; Peter Sharp, for example, had just built a product for SoftQuad which used an embedded Scheme interpreter for customization.
As for the marketers and those interested in XML only because it was going to be the Next Big Thing commercially, well, yes, but then, they would have stared at you blankly pretty much no matter which great name in computing you had mentioned.
May the vision of logic programming as a majestic edifice dominating the programming landscape come to pass; thank you for saying you think that XML has something to contribute to that edifice.
July 22, 2018 at 7:35 pm |
Thank you.