From: benjohn@...
Date: 2007-05-01T22:36:08+09:00
Subject: [OT] Logic Programming

Hello everyone.

Following a Ruby Quiz posting a while a go, and various prior mentions
of Prolog, I ventured off and had an explore on Wikipedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming

Opinion piece:

My interest here is that I'm unimpressed with the current state of
programming. My feeling is that we've gone off down the wrong route with
imperative programming and with OO. Mostly I have this feeling because
there are many things that I want to express, which I don't think are
particularly complex, but which seem hard to express with programs. I
find I need to say a lot more than I feel I should need to. I also
believe that our current approaches are much too brittle under change
(probably partly because we have to say too much in the first place).

Some of the logic ideas seem to line up with things I've been thinking
about, but they've actually got something to work ;-) So that got me
interested.

The question part:

So I'd like to have a play about with logic programming, but looking at
implementations, my enthusiasm is a bit damped. I was hoping for a
lovely graphical environment to start playing with. I'm developing on OS
X. I'm not specifically interested in Prolog alone - anything in this
area would be good. Can someone suggest tools I should be looking at for
getting a feel for the ideas? I've found this:

  http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software/Ciao/

But it's instal from source, which is often a bad beggining for me :-(

Thanks in advance,
  Benjohn