Something you might find interesting to look at is Rego, a datalog-derived language been used for writing security policies. Rego is dynamically typed, so no real protection. It's input is basically JSON and it can apply JSON-Schema, but that's it. I think it would be interesting to look at Rego as a restricted version of this and see what types buys for a Rego user. It's probably one of the larger areas of logic programming and has brought people into the fold, so to speak.
ElectroSlayer 21 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.
zeafoamrun 16 hours ago [-]
I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.
angry_octet 11 hours ago [-]
It was called "433-252 Software Engineering Principles & Tools" until ~2008 I think (433-244 before that) but then it seems to have been reorganised. Tbh, Unimelb Comp Sci is a shadow of it's former self, a victim of the 'Melbourne Model' common core sausage factory concept.
ofrzeta 11 hours ago [-]
Is it the same model as the "Bologna process" in Europe, which is kind of funny because "Bologna" also refers to a type of sausage in the US of A.
angry_octet 11 hours ago [-]
I hope he's stopped drinking Fanta.
5- 16 hours ago [-]
prince, a high quality html renderer used for typesetting, is written in mercury:
Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
zeafoamrun 16 hours ago [-]
I always understood it was a teaching language for students who wanted to get programming language implementation experience.
epgui 20 hours ago [-]
Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
ororroro 20 hours ago [-]
Why the aggression? This language while cool has existed for decades and never taken off. I just wanted a reason to believe it relevant so I could have an excuse to take another look.
hackyhacky 19 hours ago [-]
Why do you think "oldest untouched file" is a good metric for relevance? Do you know what is the oldest untouched file in gcc or Python?
srean 9 hours ago [-]
"Taking off" is an unreliable metric of capability and fitness to a problem you may want solved.
epgui 9 hours ago [-]
There was no aggression.
zeafoamrun 16 hours ago [-]
Damn dude you're making me feel old
KnuthIsGod 19 hours ago [-]
Last release was in 2023.
It is effectively dead.
This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.
kryptiskt 17 hours ago [-]
Last commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.
jamwise 18 hours ago [-]
But the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.
wduquette 9 hours ago [-]
You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.
Rendered at 23:38:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.princexml.com/doc/acknowledgements/
Perhaps I am misremembering, but my brain is telling me of a CSS or PDF parser written in Prolog.
https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html
It is effectively dead.
This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.