Comment by tomcam

I'm surprised at how readable Prolog is.

I've played with and seriously used many languages in my career. My experience is that pure functional (done Elm style) is productive and scales well to a larger team. Dynamic stuff like Ruby/Javascript always has more bugs than you think, even with "full" test coverage. I'm not smart enough to make sense of my own Scheme meta-programming when I revisit it months later. I have loads (but dated) experience with Java and it (and peers) are relatively easy to read and maintain.

Prolog is very surprising, because it is homoiconic and immensely powerful in metaprogramming, BUT ... the declarative style and execution model reigns in the complexity/readability. A term is just a term. Nothing happens when you create a term. If/when a term is a goal, then you match it with the head of an existing predicate (something you've already coded). So it never gets too messy. Now, the biggest problem with Prolog is that it's so flexible, you'll perpetually be realizing that you could have coded something much more cleanly. So you do that, have less, code, it's nicer, etc. Doing this on a large team might not scale without effort.

As someone that went through a degree where Prolog and LP was cherisched, I would say yes, however LP might be even weirder to start into than even FP.

Many folks on our degree couldn't be happier when they didn't had to see Prolog ever again, while me and others went on to take our chances on the national LP challenge across universities.

Tarski's World was a good way back then to dive into what LP is all about, without being programming language specific.

https://www.gradegrinder.net/Products/tw-index.html

I found it completely impenetrable in college for all but the simplest problems and I tried to re-read the textbook recently and I didn’t do much better.