Prolog’s Death (2010)

Maarten van Emden just posted a terrific and authoritative account of one episode in the history of Prolog under the title “Who Killed Prolog” (and, tantalizingly, promises another episode soon featuring my other super-heroic programming language, Lisp). According to van Emden, perhaps best known (by citation counts, anyway) as co-author (with Bob Kowalski) of the seminal 1976 JACM paper “The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language“, the culprit in this who-done-it is the boondogle Fifth-Generation Computer System (FGCS) project. I have had many opportunities to teach Prolog to programmers and by far the biggest cognitive problem that they have with this language is understanding what the interpreter is doing at any point in time.

Source: synthese.wordpress.com