Prolog's a surprisingly good fit for many every-day tasks where people otherwise invent DSLs or poorly-defined state machines and pattern matching algorithms.
So how come we don't use it more often? Well, the reason is actually quite simple:
Prolog's incredibly difficult to reason about once you grow past trivial facts and clauses like in the OP's article -- the examples given by him would've been introduced to you in the first lesson on Prolog in, say, University. The complexities of green/red cuts, backtracking and the procedural nature of Prolog makes it a really difficult language to truly learn -- much less one to specify complex programs in.
I've never programmed in a language where 5-6 lines of errant Prolog code could stump myself, a post grad and a professor before until I did Prolog.
So I'm not experienced with Prolog, but the thing that scared me off is that it doesn't appear to have any computational complexity guarantees. It seems like will scale very poorly as your data gets bigger. It's just a notation for exhaustive search as far as I know, and you have to add ad hoc cuts outside the declarative model to get reasonable performance.
I have experience with other abstractions which are supposed to be "declarative", but you really have to peek under the hood at the implementation to get them to work in production settings, and I don't like that.
It is a shame really. Declarative programming is so much simpler to think about and extremely powerful. I've been working on trying to make declarative programming more accessible and while I personally have seen 60x improvements in ability, I have been unable to convince any of my teammates to give it a whirl.
It is a library that works with any language, no need to learn a new one. Two people can even work on the same problem in different languages and seamlessly combine their work into one result.
So how come we don't use it more often? Well, the reason is actually quite simple:
Prolog's incredibly difficult to reason about once you grow past trivial facts and clauses like in the OP's article -- the examples given by him would've been introduced to you in the first lesson on Prolog in, say, University. The complexities of green/red cuts, backtracking and the procedural nature of Prolog makes it a really difficult language to truly learn -- much less one to specify complex programs in.
I've never programmed in a language where 5-6 lines of errant Prolog code could stump myself, a post grad and a professor before until I did Prolog.